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“... towards Darwinism and the science’s wider nationalistic uses. Uses have never been central to Peter Bowler’s work: indeed, in the past he has had a bone to pick with Edinburgh sociologists who promoted an instrumental approach to science. Nonetheless in his sturdy account of Theories of Human Evolution he, too, looks at the wider cultural and ...”

“... of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which Huxley had ...”

“... opening at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery has Marinetti in the centre of a row of artists – all in bowler hats, heavy overcoats and shiny shoes. They look like a gloomy delegation of well turned out travelling salesmen. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Elasticità’ (1912) It is appropriate that Marinetti – a writer, never a painter – is the dominant ...”

“... have been tampered with even more than the ball in a vain quest for the perfect balance between bowler and batsman. In the course of the 19th century, the argument between batsmen and bowlers was shaped by cricket’s peculiar division of labour. For the landed élite who dominated the game, bowling was disdained as a species of manual work. These lofty ...”

“... it was impossible to bowl to them. When in 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it had been waiting to happen. Years later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun Pollock for South ...”

“... What appears to others as dreary is often just the balance holding steady, with batsmen and bowler unable to shift it in either direction. This claim, trotted out so often as an excuse for taking time off to watch cricket even when the weather is cold and nothing appears to be happening, will not really do, however. All of us who use it know that in the ...”

“... a believer?’ he asks the dying man. ‘I gave you a Christian name,’ dad replies. ‘He smoked Peter Stuyvesant,’ Mark recalls. ‘His first son’s called Peter after his favourite fag.’ Memory solicits memory. Fill in your own pauses. ‘Wear some new shoes, boys.’ As a youth, doing a paper round, Mark kept out ...”

“... of what was surveyed on black and white television with an Olympian commentary by Clive Graham and Peter O’Sullevan. ‘Under starter’s orders,’ the public address system boomed. A hush fell over the distant stands. ‘They’re off.’ As the thunder of the hoofs receded, the roar of the punters rose. The Red Cross van lumbered slowly in pursuit. I ...”

“... in disgracefully cowardly circumstances, when he was ejected by the then chairman of selectors, Peter May. It is necessary to know his approach to captaincy, which, as seen from the periphery, was the equivalent of riding a bike with your feet on the handlebars (he would argue that provided you don’t crash you would still get to the bottom of the hill ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... of T. S. Eliot’s first marriage, to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and I had been pretty well put off it by Peter Redgrove’s letter to the TLS: ‘if Eliot’s diagnosis of the ills of our civilisation in prose and poetry had its root in his own sexual distress and inability in his prime to form a personal relationship with the feminine, then we have a right to ...”

“... I told over cocoa or mulled wine with devoutly disposed young men, that Savonarola said mass in a bowler, and that he would have done better to wear the conventional biretta? But from the same period I sufficiently recall the Gorgias to know that its author (by Chesterton so oddly bracketed with George Washington) would have regarded with distrust a ...”

“... people are an aspect of journeying, as in immortal books like Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days, or Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary. Bruce Chatwin’s narrative is divided by pauses for quotation and reflection. He has more than a touch of Rimbaud in him, and indeed he quotes from Une Saison en Enfer: ‘For a long time I prided myself I would possess every ...”

“... he returned to Cambridge to resume his fellowship at King’s, he was often to be seen, with his bowler-hat and brief-case, hurrying off to London for a board meeting or an appointment with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The passionate, and of necessity highly secret, homosexuality of the pre-war days was fading. His last male love was the Cambridge ...”

“... observances, with the minutiae of VAR and whether or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human ...”