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“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of ...”

“... Shortly after the Sunday Times’s enforced move into the London Docklands, David Blundy and Jon Swain were strolling towards the new production plant’s heavily-guarded entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence ...”

“... of all kinds, one which led me into some very strange cultural places. Any time I heard that, say, David Bowie was only really imitating Anthony Newley, I immediately lost interest in David Bowie and went looking for the source, sometimes with the pitiable results that this example suggests. So I was always moving backwards ...”

“... riddle of the finches was only solved more than a century after Darwin’s visit to the Galapagos. David Lack, then a schoolteacher, studied the birds in 1938-39, and in 1947 published his influential Darwin’s Finches, in which he laid out the details of the finches’ adaptive radiation, and emphasised the importance of competition between similar species ...”

“... whether it was the country itself that he missed – Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province – or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every ...”

“... to be exposed as just another false trail. One of the many pleasing things about Jedediah Berry’s first novel is that the plot hinges on a famous detective’s most celebrated cases having been solved incorrectly. The hero of The Manual of Detection is Charles Unwin, a clerk at a detective agency, known only as ‘the Agency’, which occupies all ...”

“... he arrives, and he learns to his horror that his mother died in the workhouse. The narrator in David Plante’s The Foreigner is a peeping Tom – twice in the book he experiences orgasm while watching or listening to other people making love – and he tells his story in a detached, remote style which at moments has echoes of Bainbridge’s accomplished ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... to expand his portfolio of North American newspapers, acting in concert with his close associate David Radler, whose sincerely expressed view was that the ideal newspaper consisted of ‘a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen’. Sackings, cuts, and fines for wasting paper and pencils might not sound like a recipe for brilliant ...”

“... Nick Baker describes a near miss on a footpath in Alaska. Baker was sampling a ‘salmon-pink berry’ he had just picked when his guide yanked him off the path into some bushes. A minute or so later, a bear ambled past. ‘I could see, hear, smell, feel, almost taste bear – every primeval link, every neuron I possessed, woke up in an instant.’ The ...”

“... to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. If the trout is a poem, the wand is knowledge of the land and ...”

“... the apparent Green renaissance is a silver lining. In London, a well-executed campaign by Sian Berry – perhaps profiting from Khan’s embrace of the polluting Silvertown Tunnel – positioned the Greens as London’s third party; in Bristol they attracted substantial parts of the city’s left-wing vote and now have the same number of council seats as ...”

“... is probably why it was undiscovered for so long,’ says the New Zealand stamp collector Allan Berry. Even so, a stamp which may be considered very valuable by virtue of a flaw or because it is rare can lose that value if the experts get its provenance wrong. The Royal Philatelic Society’s Expert Committee would have examined about eight hundred ...”

“... facts: he needs to provide us with an alternative theory of the general ‘idea’ of the work.* David Aers is altogether more ambitious and more theoretically self-aware than Terry Jones, but he too rides a hobby-horse too hard, and in the process grows deaf to tone. Aers’s central argument is that great poets often speak truer than they ...”

“... being accompanied by husbands or fathers (like Horace Walpole’s darling Mary and Agnes Berry), a surprising number went on their own. The amorous affairs of the young Grand Tourists seem usually to have been conducted within the endogamous British upper class, although David Hume made himself ridiculous by his ...”