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“... selection as the mechanism underlying organic evolution, Spencer remained, even after he had read and approved of The Origin, a staunch Lamarckian, believing that characteristics acquired in the course of a lifetime – the stretch of a giraffe’s neck, say – could be passed on to the next generation. It was this vision of individuals striving to ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... up a slice of the world that contains several aeons’ worth of fossil-rich strata, which we can read like the lines of a census report. The fossils in most layers did indeed demonstrate a uniform degree of biodiversity, but some indicated a massive decline. Where once there were many different forms of life, suddenly there were few. Palaeontologists and ...”

“... of the various Olympic sites in Sochi. Whoever he was speaking to he would say: ‘Have you read my book about that? You need to read my book about that.’ And he would start making arrangements to send them a pamphlet. His campaign in Sochi was quixotic. This former governor and deputy prime minister, ten years out ...”

“... this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings ...”

“... the proof. Much recurs in Modiano’s work, then, and the range is not vast. But the novels I’ve read – the recent ones – are subtly, even insidiously different from each other. You think you know where you are, because the places are similar and the natives look alike. This is an error, because they are all about loss, and scrupulously, painfully remind ...”

“... from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader, and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.’ This is Gibbon’s description of the murder of the mathematician and ...”

“... a beautiful abstraction in hazy strips of pastel colours from sand pink to sky blue, and then read the caption ‘Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground/ Dugway, UT/Distance approx. 42 miles/ 11.17 a.m.’; or we take in a semi-pastoral scene titled English Landscape, and then notice a weird array of white globes in the background identified as ...”

“... local vicar must have been as entertaining as it was scandalous and shocking. Thirty years later, Peter Vavasour from Yorkshire was prosecuted by the High Commission for similarly provocative words about the Christian doctrine of life after death. ‘Tush tush,’ he declared. ‘That is but a tricke of the clergye, to cause the people to beleeve … to gett ...”

“... and crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a ...”

“... a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum. Now, on the plush customised tour bus, Geller was thrown by how desperate Elvis ...”

“... attacked by the papers; this seemed nasty and unfair at the time, and seems more so once you have read her account of how uninterested in fashion she had been before, and how tormenting she found the press’s not-at-all-benign interest. It was André who rode to the rescue, sorting out the frocks and the ’do and many other things beside. At the UN’s ...”

“... including drama, was to use stacked prose (or ‘free verse’). In this mode there is a widely read unmetrical version of the Oresteia by Richmond Lattimore (1953), lightly revised by Mark Griffith and Glenn Most a few years ago. Lattimore turns Aeschylus’ urgent, elaborately wrought Greek verse into peculiar English, which is not in any obvious sense ...”

“... in the British Year Book of International Law, Vol. 9, 1928, at first appeared winded (Peter Beck, Guardian, 26 July, has since I wrote this revealed that the review was a Foreign Office plant and that ‘C.D.’ was Sir Cecil Hurst, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on ...”

“... lovestruck at University. They were in very free measures, and, indeed, very free syntax. I had read enough modern poetry by then to convince myself that rhyme and metre were passé, and that, anyway, the fierce and miserable beating of my heart was not to be contained by what Frost, I believe, called, with seeming disparagement, ‘rhymey-dimey ...”