“... only evolutionary mechanism. Yet the EES remains contentious. The announcement this year that the John Templeton Foundation, a Christian funding agency, has awarded an $8 million grant to a multinational team of researchers, led by the evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, to work on the EES has caused a rumble of dissent from hardline ...”

“... un-regally, being a ‘mother’s boy’. In the popular estimation he probably outranks Bad King John and Wicked King Richard III as the worst ever English king. He has this terrible reputation largely because of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This composite work is thought to have been first compiled in the 890s under the auspices of King Alfred, then copied ...”

“... description of a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1970 when he walked down John Russell Pope’s majestic central hall, the last great classical building in the Western world, with the galleries on either side ‘crammed full of people who stood up and roared at me, waving their hands and stretching them out towards me’. He was ...”

“... Christmas 1938, Lowell, home from Kenyon College where he’d enrolled to study under Tate and John Crowe Ransom, crashed his father’s car. Stafford’s skull and jaw were fractured and her nose crushed. The Lowells were more concerned with their car and their son’s mental instability than with Stafford’s injuries. There was a rumour that the Lowells ...”

“... against Anacharsis Cloots, turned on their consorting with foreign bankers – the Englishman John Ker, the Dutch banker Jean Conrad de Kock, the Belgian Charles Proli, the Moravian Frey brothers, the Spaniard André-Marie Guzman – and speculating in global markets. The sans-culottes distrusted any political behaviour whose workings were not local and ...”

“... hell itself, filled with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while dead ...”

“... Actors in Britain’s overseas empire needed more than just European languages. Sir John Bowring, the fourth governor of Hong Kong, claimed to speak a hundred languages and dialects, and was certainly adept at more than thirty. Such men, you may protest, were exceptional elite figures. True enough, but there is plenty of evidence of British and ...”

“... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...”

“... to the Roman people at the dedication of the Lateran Church that Constantine built’ (i.e. St John Lateran), and Sylvester, in the robes of papal office and attended by servants with holy vessels. True, the sculptor had failed to enter the year when all this happened. But the quality of the carvings, which resembled the crude reliefs on the Arch of ...”

“... Wedding. It is summer, and 12-year-old Frankie Addams sits at the kitchen table with her cousin John Henry and her black cook Berenice and digs a splinter out of her foot with a knife. The three play bridge with an incomplete deck and they talk until their words almost seem to rhyme. They are a group, but a group Frankie wishes desperately not to belong ...”

“... observe with trembling suspicion the unvenerated elders of their own tribe: Michael Heseltine, John Major and Ken Clarke. The recent past of the Conservative Party has become a foreign country, treacherously so. The paperback edition of Clarke’s memoirs includes as an appendix his speech in the House of Commons during the Brexit debate on 31 January this ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... forth the optimistic spirit of the revolution’. However, the transposition means that unlike John Gray (with whom he otherwise has much in common), Mishra can follow a straight line from the Counter-Enlightenment, tracing the legacy of Rousseau from the German Romantics, through the European nationalists and anarchists of the 19th century, to their more ...”

“... suffering from chronic anxiety because they can see no way out of their troubles.’ Her colleague John Stiles recently found he had no way to help a 28-year-old woman and her two children who were sleeping rough outside the railway station at Walmer, just down the coast. ‘She has mental health problems,’ Stiles said, ‘and her landlord had evicted her on ...”

“... Surrounded by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo delle Carceri, home to Saint Francis’s stone ...”