“... The Beagle had been at sea for nearly four years, and, as he wrote to his Cambridge mentor, John Henslow, Charles Darwin was increasingly anxious to get home: ‘I look forward with joy and interest to [visiting the Galapagos], both as being somewhat nearer to England, & for the sake of having a good look at an active Volcano.’ He had cause to expect ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the rest of their lives collecting art and writing books. By the early 1930s, they had acquired major works by most key modern European painters, and in 1934 Janis was invited to join the MoMA advisory committee. He would later donate a large part of his collection to the museum, including Angora Cat.Janis’s passion for modern art was matched only by his ...”

“... to blow up things and make bombs and kill people, they can still do that. That happens in most major cities in the world, most countries in the world, that people get killed and there’s violence.’ I heard that, along with banning photographs of the caskets of American soldiers, the administration was actively preventing photographs being taken of the ...”

“... encounter with the Demoiselles because the painting figures so prominently in the second volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, whose first chapter, and part of the second, are devoted to its genesis, sources, formal innovations and iconography, and the ways in which Picasso’s experiences at the time he was painting it affected its final ...”

“... The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject. Almost any other sitter would be devoured by that bright red coat, floor-length with a giant collar, but Dr Pozzi easily ...”

“... and especially the superb Tempest sequel or commentary, The Sea and the Mirror, testify to a major poet at the height of his powers. A model of professional industry, he was also in these years writing a good deal of prose.Presumably he agreed to do this heavy lecture course for the same reason he wrote prose – because he needed the money – but they ...”

“... enough of a rarity on campus to be referred to as ‘the lady professor’; and when she joined a major law firm in Little Rock in 1977, it was as its first female attorney. By the time she became a partner, women still made up less than 10 per cent of practising lawyers in the States. Her subsequent firsts were far more public. She was the first wife of an ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... it avoids the usual jargon, is the work of a conscious Marxist. I also think that it was a major contribution to ecology. In it, he faces up to the fact that ecology cannot be a science without theories, and yet any theory of ecology that is simple enough to be comprehensible will be too simple fully to reflect reality. To make matters worse, he ...”

“... In 1598 John Florio called his dictionary A World of Words, and the joy of a new dictionary is the traveller’s joy, the joy of entering a new world, or at least a new state in some loose federal union, recognisably part of the same nation, but with its own eccentricities and prejudices, more rigid or more lax in licensing laws or taboos, more or less committed to conservation ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”

“... from the belatedly respectful capitalisation of ‘Board’) in the ensuing footnote; John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, is variously Clared and Fitzgibboned all over pages 602-3 with maximum confusion for readers who do not know he was both; and, as Bertie Wooster would say, so the long day wore on, so to speak. Occasionally the text is in flat ...”

“... thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ‘purposely chose such a place, where there ...”

“... Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one can’t deny the truth of it. Potter’s admirable book piled up the evidence that would allow English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s pioneer Reformer, but, nearly half a ...”