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“... and just a little wry. Epithets like ‘disenchanted’ come to mind. That is because I have been reading the latest of John Gage’s books, Colour in Art. Gage’s achievement, here and in Colour and Culture (1993) and its successor Colour and Meaning (1999), is to tinge colour with time like no writer before. His curious and scrupulous mind teases out ...”

“... may not deserve to be done away with entirely and forthwith. Cannadine’s attitude, on my reading of his book, is a little ambivalent. Most of the time, he seems to think the decline and fall both inexorable and well-deserved. He has great fun with the bungling spendthrifts who end up abroad in flight from their creditors, the appalling shits who go ...”

“... gay couple (or artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G ...”

“... jobs in the CIA for at least 15 years. And the lying spreads. This point has been made by Peter Dale Scott in a contribution to the Pelican Assassinations (1978): ‘The Watergate investigations revealed that many men in government will conspire against the law when two justifications are offered – whether or not these justifications are credible or ...”

“... the last three years. Soloists with the chorus of praise have been distinguished and influential: Peter Porter, John Carey, John Bayley – and Raine himself has by no means been indisposed with laryngitis. His position in literary journalism and his access to the popularising media have played their part in his promotion. And the result of this rapid ...”

“... of academic life in general, but one can guess at more particular reasons. Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last thirty ...”

“... and geographic borderlines’. The usual narrative of Surrealism, the curators argue, tends to peter out around 1939, when many European artists were forced to flee the coming war. With pieces from the 1920s to the 1980s, Surrealism beyond Borders blows right past this date, with the implication that, when it comes to such international movements, the ...”

“... or smooth, hairy, spiny or naked. Why? Thirty-five years ago, in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, Peter Grubb posed questions about the sizes and shapes and function of leaves: why most evergreen leaves are oblong or ovate, in contrast to the leaves of deciduous species, which have a much wider variety of shapes; why leaves two hundred million years ago had a ...”

“... or whether life forms actually died out. Because of accidents of preservation, fossils tend to peter out slowly in any strata sequence, with the result that the general record suggests the gradual disappearance of species rather than sudden extinction. Only by carrying out a dogged search close to the boundary can the final disappearance of a species be ...”

“... a human link between the two adventurers, and rather more to the story. Another old Himalaya hand, Peter Steele, now tells it well, and puts right a longstanding injustice. Toiling up mountains for sport is, beyond any doubt, a British invention. People who live among mountains – the Sherpas of Nepal, for instance – can see no sense in it. Mountain ...”

“... man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end of the Second World War was before my ...”

“... be non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt lived for six months with a young male dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa project to teach dolphins to speak. The pair grew extremely close. Peter would often get sexually aroused and rub himself against Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons. Eventually Lovatt started to ...”

“... not to mention ‘the grey, ageing, tired, harassed and a little bewildered Jennie Lee’. Reading a life of Haldane in 1960, he confessed that ‘it gives me a shock to realise how interesting, constructive, useful political activity can be, in contrast to the way we have to spend our time in this disintegrating Labour Party.’ This volume of ...”

“... appropriate bits of the case. The interest so upsetting to Nilsen – the dog-loving, Guardian-reading Job Centre bureaucrat and former policeman who killed and dismembered 15 men – seems to be at an all-time high. There is a particular fascination with people like Nilsen: that is to say, with serial killers, who apart from featuring in the books under ...”

“... towards Darwinism and the science’s wider nationalistic uses. Uses have never been central to Peter Bowler’s work: indeed, in the past he has had a bone to pick with Edinburgh sociologists who promoted an instrumental approach to science. Nonetheless in his sturdy account of Theories of Human Evolution he, too, looks at the wider cultural and racial ...”