“... for hours on end – on his theory of Projective Verse, proprioception, Mayan glyphs, Alfred North Whitehead, a grab bag of poetic theorising. Six foot eight and wide of girth, he commanded a room. On one occasion in Berkeley, wind in his sails, he ranted on stage for more than four hours before Duncan walked out and the staff turned off the ...”

“... will already know that Lincoln has four more years to live before he is shot by Herold’s friend, John Wilkes Booth, the most notorious of all those Americans who have sought to win fame by killing heroes and idols. In this urgent manner, blending the legendary and the humdrum, Gore Vidal introduces his story, like a 20th-century version of a Greek tragedy ...”

“... natural-history keeper staged annual cremations of Sloane’s decaying entomological specimens. John Cannon, an eminent plant taxonomist, reveals that after contemplating Sloane’s herbarium ‘one is left with a slight nagging feeling of anti-climax’ because the collector had the misfortune to live just before taxonomy became a proper science with ...”

“... Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the spirit of the time, a recovery of ancient sources. Its philosophical base was Neoplatonic and ...”

“... and the narrator run a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister; both are married to a man called John). The book is a composite creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ...”

“... coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female line a senior claim ...”

“... encounter, which outraged most Black leaders and seems to have inspired racial violence in the North, as a calculated performance to prepare conservative whites for the coming announcement of emancipation.Once he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January, 1863, Lincoln’s racial views underwent rapid evolution. Unfortunately, while devoting a ...”

“... Alan Bristow, a helicopter tycoon who had done very well out of flying people to and from the North Sea oil rigs (and by curbing trade unions), made a bid and then withdrew it. By the early summer it looked as though Westlands would go bust. Good riddance, as far as the Government was concerned. When Westland workers or management lobbied the Government ...”

“... newspaper modelled on the Big Issue. Valery was going to the town of Tikhvin, about 240 kilometres north of the City on the Neva, to meet a priest, Father Alexander, who was also doing charity work with the homeless. I invited myself along. We roared up to Tikhvin in a ten-year-old Volkswagen driven by Yuri and Alexei, two friends of Valery. Both seemed ...”

“... in Africa; I attended the opening of a health centre a year or so ago in West Nile Province in the North of Uganda. The four-wheel drive vehicle bearing the District Medical Officer arrived with the slogans of the Ugandan anti-Aids campaign painted on its doors in English: ‘Love Carefully’, ‘Zero Grazing’. The Medical Officer, and the Chairman of the ...”

“... top of the news bulletins in May 2013 when a set of footprints appeared on a beach in Happisburgh, north Norfolk. The prints were 850,000 years old, the oldest human footprints outside Africa and by far the earliest mark of human presence in Britain. Surging tides had exposed long-hidden marks of a group of H. antecessor walking upriver: an adult and a group ...”

“... it addictive and “irresponsible”.’) Fortnite is owned by a private company, Epic, based in North Carolina. That is less cool than the West Coast bases of League and Dota 2, and the game is less cool too – which is part of its appeal. The big thing about Fortnite is that unlike all the other games I’ve mentioned so far, which are usually played on ...”

“... bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in ...”

“... and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North Africa, tigers and elephants from Persia and the rest of Western Asia. The Old Testament launched the Judaeo-Christian tradition on a different course that was equally unfortunate. The notion that God had given humanity ‘dominion’ over the beasts has ...”