“... has origins that can be traced to Scotland in the 1720s, where, from his ministry near Dundee, John Glas dissented from the practice of covenanting and insisted that a national church of Scotland under Parliamentary control was not sanctioned by the Bible. In the growth of the breakaway church Glas’s son-in-law Robert Sandeman played a seminal ...”

“... the early part, in the narrator’s consciousness, can be delicious: as good as Virginia Woolf, or John Betjeman, who would have adored subtle pentameters like ‘The irregular line of elms by the deep lane’. And like Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Robert Browning had advised Elizabeth to present as translations, and which were not published as her own ...”

“... Network’ – men like William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Charles Babbage, George Airy, John Herschel and John Henslow. Some half-dozen pieces on the Cambridge Apostles, not the oldest but certainly the longest-lived of student secret societies, have made readers familiar with a whole generation of ...”

“... She began her address – ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’ – by saying: ‘According to John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, it is “repugnant to nature”, as well as “contumely to God, and the subversion of good order”, to promote a woman to any position of superiority in any realm. We in the ...”

“... answers. More and more they were coming to accept that occasionally species might disappear – Darwin would soon propose that ‘the appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms’ were procedurally ‘bound together’ by natural selection – but evolution was a gradual process. Mass extinction, ‘revolution’, was something else. The ...”

“... distinction of that earlier generation of fellows: not just AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English ...”

“... he left his second wife and children in 2000, and he has made several public appearances in drag.) John McCain has shown himself to be unreliable on terror with his liberal-sounding objections to torture at Guantánamo and is too friendly to illegal immigrants. With Mitt Romney, it’s hard to know which is the more off-putting: that he served as governor of ...”

“... important intellectuals of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public ...”

“... view. And yet, for the next fifty years there were few reports on these seemingly uncharted lands. John Gunther’s bestselling 1949 memoir, Death Be Not Proud, about the death from cancer of his brilliant 17-year-old son, is a notable exception. Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty ...”

“... book, on Lord Acton, was a history of his mind rather than the story of his life. Her study of Darwin was primarily an account of his thoughts and his theories: it was the mind not the man who mattered. Her collected essays, revealingly published under the title Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study ...”

“... longest-running experiment in the history of science. The Park Grass Experiment, set up in 1856 by John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, has now been running more than five times longer than its nearest rival, and still yields results of use to plant ecologists. The original object was to assess the effects of different fertilisation regimes on a ...”

“... indirect style – though McEwan makes less use than Bellow of interior monologue – and, like John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ books, in the present tense. There’s also an allusion to Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in the novel’s closing sentence (as McEwan pointed out in an interview on Radio 4), and the influence of Ulysses makes itself felt in several ways ...”

“... unmatched: the tallest giraffe ever recorded, a Masai bull, measured 19.3 feet. The explorer John Mandeville only mildly exaggerated when he wrote of the ‘gerfauntz’, in the first English-language account in 1356, that it had a neck ‘twenty cubytes long [about thirty feet] … he may loken over a gret high hous.’ (As Mandeville is himself a ...”

“... from Les Réflexions sur la Violence and from Nietzsche (who got his stuff fundamentally from Darwin) – this doctrine taken over by Hitler and influencing so many minds in Europe might be made to do its fell work on the soul of a character in fiction.’ But Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, whom Lewis invokes, grew naturally in his creator’s mind out of the ...”