“... 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 ...”

“... knowing that in writing these texts he may risk becoming an ethnic performer who will see himself reading To congregations of the educated Sipping wine, attentive between courses – See the applause fluttering from their white hands Like so many messy table napkins. In some ways, Dabydeen stands in the position of McIlvanney or the Dunn of ...”

“... and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ‘Time Passing, Beloved’ and Gunn’s ‘On the Move’ in O’Brien) is to see how the Movement contains the germ of its own undoing in these restless and questing poets. In fact, the only thing that keeps the Movement sensibility ...”

“... was that this novel, and its successors, represent the author’s greatest achievement. Ray’s reading of Thackeray’s fiction was based on what he called ‘the buried life’ to be found in them; and in his view even the late novels, written when Thackeray was chronically sick, were works of genius. Thackeray was undervalued by posterity because, unlike ...”

“... outlined for me the consequences of such a proof being valid. Independently of this, I had been reading Bertrand Russell’s diaries and I wanted to write a story which would somehow illustrate the way diary writing, in its selectivity, closely resembles fiction writing. Thirdly, I wanted to write about the collision of two intellectual worlds. In 1972 I ...”

“... Another recent biography of a leading modern artist was composed under similar restrictions. Peter Ackroyd says he was ‘forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence’. As it happens, the two subjects, while ...”

“... Dillard (1945-) and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ...”