“... his career as a naturalist: his father, and his scientific mentor, the Cambridge professor John Henslow. While Desmond and Moore’s style was colourful, punchy and occasionally melodramatic, liberally embellished with exclamation marks, the tone of Browne’s writing, though no less vivid, is often lightly ironic. She has Darwin showing off to Henslow ...”

“... it. Even the man who was to become the most famous of the early English captives in America, John Smith, who had been ‘rescued’ from the Algonquin chief, Powhatan, by his daughter Pocahontas (playing Medea to Smith’s Jason), had first been captured by the Turks and sold as a slave in Istanbul. The continuity of the stories of the Empire from the ...”

“... in some of these views (and certainly the more formal diary of Pepys’s friend and contemporary John Evelyn is consciously scientific in its interests), but it is painfully reductive to see Pepys’s diary as a piece of double-entry book-keeping of the soul, or as a spiritual equivalent to the microscope Robert Hooke was using in the 1660s to count the ...”

“... of the procedure. In England the subject took off when it was enthusiastically sponsored by Dr John Elliotson of University College London. He welcomed it not only as an extraordinary new therapy, but as something that could throw light on psychology and pathology, even on the very nature of the vital principle. Mesmer’s claim that there was a magnetic ...”

“... white, ethereal cloud’. Depending on the setting and production-run, $75 to $200 would get you John F. Kennedy, Napoleon or Marilyn Monroe on your finger. Dancing Naked is partly an autobiography, mostly an explosive voiding of rheum on the idiocies of contemporary science and culture. Mullis presents himself as a professional eccentric, a voice crying in ...”

“... many artists who later reappeared in Documenta 11, including Bouabré and Kingelez as well as John Akomfrah, a member of the Black Audio Film Collective and director of Handsworth Songs, a breakthrough documentary of the Handsworth riots intercut with a series of interviews. Documenta 11 also drew artists from its immediate predecessor, Catherine ...”

“... joke: ‘Muhammad Ali was Jewish’ (Chapter 2); ‘Bette Davis was Jewish’ (Chapter 3); ‘John Lennon was Jewish’ (Chapter 4); and so on. The text often blooms into a special boxed feature, such as: ‘The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi’ (this takes a whole page) or: Haggadah (Pop Quiz #1) Q. When Alex and Adam had a smoke, how much of ...”

“... diagnosis (courtesy of a doctor modelled on the currently fanatically discredited John Money, who believed and perhaps believes that gender is socially established in a child’s first two years, and advocated surgery for a normal life); a spell in the wilderness (a San Francisco emporium of the exotic) to come to terms with who he/she is; and ...”

“... describes William Barrett, a doctor active in the Society for Psychical Research, assisting John Tyndall, a leading scientific naturalist, when Tyndall was demonstrating the effects of sound on light at the Royal Institution in the 1860s. Shaking a bunch of keys, or chirruping, or clapping loudly from a distance, Tyndall showed that he could quell the ...”

“... even foreword mail. An introduction presupposes ignorance. When Albert J. Guerard introduced John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: ‘Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under ...”

“... champagne and brandy . . . to incapacitate any lesser man’, as his private secretary John Colville put it. He would talk to ministers with Toby, his budgie, alighting (and sometimes doing more than that) on their heads. He had frequent sleeps. His method of dealing with crises, he explained, was to ‘turn out the light, say “bugger ...”

“... of her blows is shaped in large part by her chosen sparring partners: Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Moller Okin. Though some of the nudging she gives feminists – typically referred to in Sex and Social Justice as ‘them’ but in the more recent Women and Human Development as ‘my fellow ...”

“... the street: ‘There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anyone else understands.’ John Locke, then a political refugee in the Netherlands, simply couldn’t master the mathematics, though this didn’t stop him reviewing the book in the Dutch press. He was glad to be reassured by a local expert that he could take the sums and proofs on ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... is only extreme consciousness: an enhanced receptivity to truth. It was around this point that John Clellon Holmes, a stay-at-home quester, purloined testimony from Kerouac and Ginsberg for a pelf-garnering pseudo-Beat romance (Go!), and, in a notorious article in the New York Times (‘This Is the Beat Generation’), took metonymic possession of ...”