“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to fight for the Jacobites and be executed for treason. Not that the ICS was a much safer choice: William Wedderburn joined it in 1860 shortly after his brother and sister-in-law and their child had been killed in the Mutiny. Later in his career he responded to another Scottish ‘calling’, joining the band of radical civil servants who supported Indian ...”

“... the boundary between flesh and cloth was indeterminate. According to the Book of Job, in the King James version, we are clothed in skin and flesh; but one might equally describe early modern men and women as fleshed in clothes. ‘To be laid out upon a petticoat’ meant to have sex. When Queen Elizabeth imagined the ultimate destitution she said she might be ...”

“... an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked best about Ibsen what others abhorred – his ...”

“... the same subject. As well as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like ...”

“... political stronghold of Luo Nyanza. Many young Kenyans saw Odinga’s decision to enter President William Ruto’s ‘broad-based government’ in 2024, in exchange for Ruto’s endorsing his bid to become chair of the African Union Commission, as a betrayal. (Odinga later lost the AUC election to Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the former foreign minister of ...”

“... a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature before Henry James, ascribing to the American postwar era various creative ‘innovations’ that actually date back hundreds of years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by ...”

“... World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in the illegal shipment of 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition from Germany ...”

“... because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. James Lovelock, in his powerful and extremely depressing book The Revenge of Gaia, says this: I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most ...”