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“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... hordes of scientific labourers beavering away from nine to five. Sir Francis Galton was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, and (like Darwin) left Cambridge with an ordinary degree. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘I had been immensely impressed by many obvious cases of heredity among the Cambridge men who were at the ...”

“... service to geology in rescuing Smith from comparative obscurity. It seems extraordinary that Darwin has had several dozen biographies and T.H. Huxley not so many fewer, yet Smith has been celebrated only by his nephew John Phillips in 1844 (Phillips was later to be a distinguished geological professor at Oxford). Since ...”

“... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother falls to her death, Silver and her ...”

“... on our ancestors can help us to characterise more accurately what our minds are like right now. Darwin presented the process of natural selection as a sort of ersatz creator. He thought one of the great triumphs of his theory lay in its ability to give transmutationists – those who thought species were modified versions of their ancestors – a good ...”

“... the Lion Woman’, ‘Chang the Chinese Giant’, ‘Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy’ and John Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. But by the turn of the century, the mood of the public had changed and the public display of such ‘human prodigies’ – as they preferred to be called – had become unacceptable in many countries. The profession of ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... does them. By a series of accidents, this motleyest of crews is marooned on the Galapagos, where Darwin made his conclusive observations about natural selection. The biology teacher digitally transfers the captain’s semen from her uterus to the Indian girls’ wombs. The resulting offspring mate with the furry Japanese, and humankind is launched on a new ...”

“... Sir William Boyd Dawkins, not a direct ancestor, if ancestor at all, of the present carrier of the Darwin meme – before Johnson has recovered from his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence never flags, his melodious voice booms on, wowing sympathetic ...”

“... lost many friendly ears by seeming too clever by half, whereas a modest and sober scholar like Darwin had to be listened to carefully. The relevance of that reputation to the subject in question is also an important factor: many famous scientists have been tempted to blow the trumpet of their idiosyncratic prejudices far beyond their expert knowledge. But ...”

“... often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his dogmatism, religiosity, ‘moralism’ and hostility to personal liberty). Nevertheless, prominent 19th-century figures who acknowledged a ...”

“... I would go out of my mind. I used to think then that had I had the chance to marry Charles Darwin (or Einstein or Metternich) I might have been able to accept the arrangements that marriage entails a little more gracefully. In the Eighties, long since divorced, I decided that marriage to Nelson Mandela (or Terry Waite) would have suited me fine. When ...”

“... writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... his apprenticeship without mishap in 1761. By 1767 he was in partnership with another bookseller, John Payne, in premises in Paternoster-row by St Paul’s Churchyard, ‘the centre of bookselling’, and he was to settle in the capital for the rest of his life. The profession of bookseller was at that time a capacious one. Johnson not only sold books but ...”

“... I have recently read The History Men by John Kenyon. I remember reading a different book, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, some years ago. I did not find Bradbury’s book at all funny, which I am told it is intended to be. After a careful reading I had not the slightest inkling of what the book was supposed to be about ...”