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“... be dismissed as not especially consequential. In Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (1997), Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen devote only half a sentence to it: ‘The dust cloud … lasted less than two years, and its effects upon the environment, though harmful to people, were short-lived.’ But Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his ...”

“... Canon Charcot’s method of consumption: pull out the gizzard and swallow the bird whole. M.F.K. Fisher calls this recipe ‘brutishly refined’ but admits puzzlement as to what the canon did with the feathers.) By the time of Petronius the dish was already an absurdity. Decapitated at the table, live thrushes (the poor man’s fig-pecker) fluttered out of ...”

“... profit, to be obtained through the collection of fees and opportunities for patronage.The aim of Mark Knights’s book is to explain why Britain took so long to move from the old conception of office-holding to our present one by showing how the issue was debated over more than two centuries. A historian of the 17th century by training, Knights stresses that ...”

“... come in for slagging.) Yet we also hear that many artists Hughes admires couldn’t draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian ...”

“... and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met doesn’t seem to understand what is wrong with this. It’s just one word. Tact.20 February. The walls of the sitting room and the study in ...”

“... found it difficult to understand why a person would admit to crimes he has not committed. Michael Fisher, Hill’s solicitor after 1987, was initially far from convinced of his new client’s innocence. ‘If he is innocent,’ Fisher said to me, ‘why did he confess?’ Fisher could not ...”

“... his favourite Augustine, and Cyprian, a doughty defender of the Church, and perhaps by aid from Fisher. He was also familiar with heretical doctrine from being present at interrogations. Later, he knew the work of Tyndale, Luther’s great English mouthpiece. In controversy, he was not as scrupulous in presenting the opposite case as some, myself ...”

“... Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher. ‘The array of personalities in the literary area is startling,’ one of them wrote. ‘Few were born in New York, although we speak of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay, one of the movement’s ornaments, was born in Jamaica, Eric Walrond, short ...”

“... at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”

“... from the Book of the Month club. One member of the selection committee, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was offended by the way Black Boy overlooked those white Americans who ‘have done what they could to lighten the dark stain of racial discrimination in our nation’. The second half of the book, about Wright’s often harrowing experiences in Chicago ...”

“... responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even though, as his policy architect Andrew Fisher observes, ‘if you’re the leader you have to lead on everything, not just the things you care about.’Corbyn’s reluctance to compromise on political matters can be overstated: political realism led him to jettison his long-held republicanism, though ...”

“... academic conversation would become difficult to carry on. ‘Pre-emptive’ comes closer to the mark: you say this sort of thing about yourself before anyone else can. But that’s public, and a recognised ‘act’. In 1978, Berlin wrote a private letter to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, wondering why he, a beloved only child, should still be visited with ...”

“... in 1930, when a 38-year-old professor of Anglo-Saxon and father of four small children sat down to mark some exam scripts. On a blank page he found himself writing this: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ This is still the first sentence of the children’s classic we know.He always said he had no idea where the sentence came from, or what a ...”