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“... In his introduction to this remarkable book, Oliver Morton writes that it is ‘about how ideas from our full and complex planet are projected onto the rocks of that simpler, empty one’. Projection, Morton believes, has determined our thinking about Mars from the outset. The planet had attracted its complement of myth well before the Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made his new map of Mars in 1877, and its features, dimly discernible through inadequate telescopes and often obscured by dust storms, had already acquired fanciful names ...”

“... German engineer responsible for the V2 rocket, never had launch troubles – amazingly, given what Oliver Morton in The Moon: A History for the Future describes as the ‘ludicrously powerful’ five F-1 engines at its base. At lift-off, the rocket weighed three thousand tonnes. ‘The shell of ice that had clung to the super cool metal,’ ...”

“... on ‘both the quality or otherwise of the audience and Lola’s mood each night’, as James Morton writes in his entertaining biography. And sometimes ‘it depended on what money was thrown on stage.’ More or fewer parts of Lola’s body might be exposed during the dance, which was in two parts. In the first, she played the spider, spinning its ...”

“... pale blond hair’ and ‘soft rueful eyes’. And he isn’t Norman Wilfred: he’s Oliver Fox, who was meant to be coming to Skios with his girlfriend, Annuka Vos, to spend a week in a borrowed villa, but she’s just dumped him, so he asked a woman he met in a bar to come with him instead. But she – her name’s Georgie – has missed her ...”

“... as farce or fiction. What is one to make of an organisation whose leaders have names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from ...”

“... reign of Henry VIII’s father. He concludes by recording a wary conversation in which Cardinal Morton declines to speak freely to the Duke of Buckingham about King Richard because ‘I love not much to talk of princes, as a thing not all out of peril.’ An innocent word, warns Morton, may be taken, not ‘as the party ...”

“... He could have travelled in his youth had he been willing to put up with great hardship. Young Oliver Goldsmith hiked over the Continent, staying at various universities and earning his way by debating. This was not Johnson’s style: he could endure physical deprivation, certainly, but not the psychic deprivation of loneliness. His expansive centrifugal ...”

“... them. It is easy to argue about the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl ...”