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“... and Ancestors (1982), The Politics of Evolution (1989) and, most successfully, Darwin (1991, with James Moore). Desmond’s literary technique has itself undergone evolution and, with his last two works, is now perfectly adapted to his purposes. Biography (currently the best-paid and best-selling of genres) is Desmond’s preferred form despite the fact that ...”

“... heroes of Empire were never the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often ...”

“... as authoritative, rather than authorised. An authorised biography was to have been written by James Pope-Hennessy, who had gathered much material before he came to his violent end. Hoare received the ‘approval and co-operation’ of the Coward estate. Over the years other hands had tried to pluck away the veils from the Coward legend. We read how ...”

“... his first volume of poetry, Mount Zion (paid for, intriguingly, by the Surrealist patron, Edward James), and, with the Shell Guides, moving into broadcasting and publishing, Pevsner was restarting his working life from scratch. He was studying the hide-bound establishments of British industry in the West Midlands, interviewing with amazement Kidderminster ...”

“... heroically assembled is often more ambivalent than his own thesis. The diary of the Oldham weaver, William Rowbottom, does not suggest that ‘every Briton decided one way or the other’ on the validity of Britain’s war against France and its revolution. It shows that Rowbottom hated the rich and wanted peace, but also that he relished British naval ...”

“... by a before-the-credit-titles introduction by Carl Sagan, American television’s equivalent of James Burke and Patrick Moore, combining Burke’s Flash Harry glibness with Moore’s manic enthusiasm. In rhapsodic prose, Sagan sets the Grand Canyon in the perspective of terrestrial and even extra-terrestrial geology, pointing out that, a mere 350 km in ...”

“... authors seek to convince us that it was the Cabinet’s military adviser, the ranker-general Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who tried to concentrate the minds of the civilians and persuade them to evaluate the achievements in Flanders, not the civilian ministers who were trying to oblige him to do so. The Cabinet had begun to go ...”

“... rounds that he might be restrained by an ‘axis of adults’: Tillerson, as secretary of state; James Mattis, as secretary of defence; and John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff. Bolton wants to place himself outside this particular axis. He blames his colleagues for the administration’s chaotic lack of process, and for engaging in ‘transparently ...”

“... ills missed the point. Such complaints were tired restatements of the early 19th-century radical William Cobbett’s claim that Britain was smothered by a monstrous network of corruption, which he labelled the ‘Thing’. In the 1960s, no such powerful clique of reactionaries existed; instead, the problem was the failure of Britain’s various small centres ...”

“... to Greenland. Only Minik remained, on display to scientists and the public. He was adopted by William Wallace, a member of the Museum’s staff, and began to adapt to the new culture, learning English and going to school. Wallace and others hoped the boy could become a missionary, a teacher, perhaps even a doctor, who could return to the Arctic and bring ...”

“... England there was nothing. The absence of English Scriptures helps explain the great impact that William Tyndale’s English translations, first of the New Testament and then of substantial parts of the Old, had on the country in the 1520s and 1530s. His New Testaments, printed on the Continent, were bought up by the Bishop of London, who had them burned in ...”

“... They were consumed not only by dilettantes or libertines, like Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not entirely easy – to understand the ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and ...”

“... productions written for the occasion in a distinctly Pickwickian manner. Its members included William Godwin junior, son of the political philosopher by his second wife, whose account of the origins of Shakespeare’s genius, a poem called ‘Olympian Mulberry Leaves; or, The Offerings of the Gods to Shakespear’, is every bit as Gothic as anything ...”

“... in a riot of onomatopoeia when the song was performed as a round. Harris introduces us to William Merle, who between 1337 and 1344 kept a diary of the weather at Driby in Lincolnshire, one of the earliest such records to survive, and to Sir Gawain watching the seasons turn in the anxious year between his first meeting with the Green Knight and the ...”