“... Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts ...”

“... form’ of the mushroom becomes an occasion for reflecting on the search for form itself. We may know that a particular passion comes at a price, that it has negative consequences for us or those around us, but it’s hard to say a passion is all bad, or even bad at all. The mushroom hunter has ‘a feeling that was at once also a certitude, that through ...”

“... moments when a character unexpectedly turns and addresses the house and, in a word, preaches. This may be because as a boy and a regular worshipper at St Michael’s, Headingley I heard a lot of sermons. I also used to go to Saturday matinees at the Grand Theatre in Leeds, though on occasion the sermons were more dramatic than the plays. This was particularly ...”

“... been the furthest thing from her mind. She was terribly sorry if she had given offence. Again it may have been the influence of the cocktail, multicultural in its own right, combining champagne and brandy from the Old World, sugar and bitters from the New, which gave Dad’s verdict its austere force. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something you will have to ...”

“... take back to the other side. And he has suggested that McGuinness was aware of his tactics. In May 1993, for example, when the British government and the IRA were haggling over the ceasefire terms, McGuinness gave Duddy a written message from Sinn Féin to be taken to London. Duddy’s archive contains an account of what happened next: The wording of the ...”

“... cruise was led by an American whose identity is redacted, but the editor, Larry Siems, thinks it may have been the navy reservist Richard Zuley, identified in court documents as the Special Projects Team chief for Slahi’s interrogations at Guantánamo, a retired Chicago cop now working for the aviation police at O’Hare International Airport. Slahi was ...”

“... Kipling quotation (‘the toad beneath the harrow knows exactly where each tooth-point goes’) may have been apposite, it went along with the lugubriousness that had him signing himself ‘oldtimer’ at 30. He was also president, or some such, of the primary school teachers’ professional association. My father’s father, Fernly Charlewood ...”

“... sector progresses, the private sector progresses,’ contributed to society’s debate. Chongqing may not have offered a perfect blueprint, and it’s hard to know whether Bo himself was corrupt, but its architects stressed the importance of equality and common prosperity, and tried to work towards them. The Chongqing experiment, launched in 2007, coincided ...”

“... between the classes and between the sexes, but it was not especially interested in politics. This may have been a relief for the revisionists, inadvertently confirming them in their belief that the social had little to do with the political. But it made little sense in terms of the English Revolution itself. The old debates about whether the ‘rise of the ...”

“... of Sicily. It is also possible that pasta was introduced into Italy by the Sicilian Arabs, who may have brought it into North Africa from Persia. The making of vermicelli near Palermo is described by the 12th-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi a couple of generations before the journeys of Marco Polo. Here the movements that Abulafia documents so ...”

“... procedures, the ill-defined aims, the simple lack of conscientiousness and common sense – we may in child protection be up against something ancient and ineradicable in human nature: the belief that, if I have suffered, someone else must suffer, that two wrongs make a right. ‘I was in there six months, and my mam never came to see me.’ Ruby’s ...”

“... moments between the star and class-crossed lovers (yes, them), Lady Mary begins a sentence: ‘It may be a cliché, Matthew, but …’ ‘Period’ might be thought to be synonymous with ‘historical’, but in this kind of popular fiction it is a quite separate category. Downton Abbey (like the original and the new Upstairs, Downstairs, and the upcoming ...”

“... It helps that the gamer’s proxy is always on a quest – for money, gold, any token that may have valuta if not intrinsic value. The numbers it’s necessary to lay waste to en route to these trinkets inflate according to the classification of the game, as do their character – poisonous spiders, hellhounds, Nazi zombies – and the graphic nature ...”

“... me.’ Whatever fantasy you can’t act out in real life can be fulfilled in fan fiction. May-December relationships are very popular, as are boys transforming into girls. BDSM has a huge following. But the most common sexual ‘perversion’ is gay sex. On AO3, as of 17 October 2012, ‘roughly four in nine’ works were categorised as M/M. Some ...”

“... these islands. It fitted well with his hatred of revolutionary rationalism across the Channel. It may seem odd to say that Berkeley was wary of abstractions when he produced such a wildly speculative doctrine as esse est percipi, but the truth is that he thought it no more than common sense. It was, he thought, what the man in the street believed too. The ...”