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“... Why, in the great majority of animals, are there equal numbers of males and females? For John Arbuthnot, writing in 1710, it was evidence of the beneficence of God: ‘for by this means it is provided, that the species may never fail, nor perish, since every male may have its female, and of a proportionable age.’ But while that might do for man, it will hardly do for those many species in which there is no monogamous pair bond and no parental care, and in which one male can fertilise many females, and yet which have an equal sex ratio ...”

“... that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and ...”

“... moral outlook, a rejection of traditional religious beliefs. Quite incongruously, Fitz’s poem took off in this company, its epicureanism given a new look by Eastern colours which also give the poem a daring, even sexy quality, the hint of a new sort of voluptuousness behind the veils, moons and roses. In the traditional rubai that Omar and others were ...”

“... early inspirations to ‘a willowy Wren’ who ‘recognised the bracken where we stood ... and took “argute” on trust’. It is Larkin bracken, and also points towards those tall fronds on the heath near Bockhampton where Hardy as a child sat and pondered his intellectual future. But as well as these English inspirations – Cambridge, Barnsley, the ...”

“... the phrases of the Anglican liturgy function as patent jargon. With entertaining animus, he also took a stick to the near and would-be professions, arguing that the lexicons of the established professions (‘defrocking’, ‘disbarring’, ‘striking off’, ‘cashiering’) deserved more respect than those of the aspirant professions (from academia to ...”

“... eat. How many of us who know that milk is pasteurised have also heard of the ingenious Irishman, John Tyndall, who in the 1870s discovered that mother bacteria are destroyed by heating food or milk, but that their offspring survive? These sturdy youngsters have had their powers of resistance much reduced, however, so that they succumb to an ensuing bout of ...”

“... involved with him for fear of censorship on moral or political grounds. One future bishop called John Personne, the author of Strindbergian Literature and Immorality among Schoolchildren, blamed Strindberg for masturbation among the young. The Bonniers’ business suffered from publishing him and the subsequent rejections fed Strindberg’s ...”

“... different style. I’d never heard anything like it,’ Count Basie said. In time he employed her. John Hammond, the pioneering record producer who ‘discovered’ Holiday, said: she ‘changed my musical tastes and my music life’; she ‘sang like an improvising jazz genius’. ‘I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I’m playing a horn. I try to ...”

“... 2012, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester put on an exhibition of works by the painters Gwen John and Celia Paul. What now seems obvious was then inspired. The comparison diminished neither. Two artists, distinct but in obvious affinity, spoke across their different periods and each made the other more necessary, more triumphant. It was as though ...”

“... forty-eight, we argued all         night about whether a poem was good enough for us. John         Ashbery sat in a corner shelling pistachio nuts;         Robert E. Bly wore a three- piece suit and a striped tie; Kenneth         Koch was always sarcastic. Once as we pasted an issue         together we discovered a ...”

“... information. He was acquitted. Frolik also named a Labour minister, the postmaster general, John Stonehouse – who, he said, had been recruited in the late 1950s after being compromised by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime ...”

“... mistakes. Nor is the culture confined to the Police: on the evidence of the legal hearings which took place, it also infects the judiciary – and there is more than a suspicion that large areas of the legal profession are not immune to it either. This culture of inerrancy, in turn, shifts the focus of police work from detection to deduction – the latter a ...”

“... part of it as a confirmation of social status. His brother Warren, an officer in the RASC, took the same view of the Army. They remained inseparable all their lives, Lewis both accepting and to some extent controlling his brother’s heavy drinking. When he got religion Lewis found himself in an anomalous position, an outsider to the Oxford ...”

“... to his sister in Rouen to tell her of the evening he had spent with, among others, Victor Hugo: I took pleasure in studying him closely; I gazed at him with astonishment, like a casket in which there were millions and a king’s diamonds, reflecting on all that had come from this man now sitting beside me on a small chair, and fixing my eyes on the right hand ...”

“... his career, and ‘on a massive scale’, Glover writes, ‘that would still astonish today’. It took the form of a graceful single arch springing from Southwark Cathedral on the south bank to Angel Lane on the north. As we can see from a wonderful aquatint after Thomas Malton, the artist laureate of the architecture of late Georgian London, ‘it would have ...”