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“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... and, eventually, illegal material. Michael was subject to a variant of what the psychologist John Suler identified in 2001 as the ‘online disinhibition effect’: the phenomenon whereby computer users feel shielded by the apparent anonymity of the web, encouraging behaviour in which they would not normally indulge in the real world. Like much of what ...”

“... If you take, not the work, but the writer, then the attention seems entirely justified. Three major books on her to appear in the past decade have all been biographies – one by an American, one by a New Zealander, and now one by an Englishwoman. In all of them she appears not only as a writer of some importance in the development of modern fiction, but ...”

“... friends and colleagues, and who at one point confesses that, liking stories as he does, one of his major motivations in running for office was to give people better stories to tell. One feels that the acknowledgements, like the book, could have gone on for ever: only the firm hand of Bob Gottlieb at Knopf apparently kept the book from being twice as long. As ...”

“... Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer about ...”

“... lectures, biographies and privy pieces of self-promotion that in our wicked age accompany all major anniversaries – are over. But one key question remains unanswered. How is it possible to like Milton? There is certainly a great deal to dislike. Most people would think of him as an overlearned poet who combines labyrinthine syntax with a wide range of ...”

“... was: ‘Gentlemen, the Times is printed – by steam.’ The year was 1814; the proprietor was John Walter II; the new technology was the Koenig steam-driven press capable of over a thousand impressions an hour, against the 250 impressions which was all the old Stanhope iron press could manage; and his tactic of secrecy and confrontation (he was frightened ...”

“... the Colorado River itself on a boat or raft. While the air thickens with flying misquotations from Major John Wesley Powell’s pioneer navigation of the Canyon in 1869, the less committed among us may reflect that these approved ways of seeing the place are extremely time-consuming, and require the setting aside of three or more days of one’s time, and ...”

“... John Vavassour de Quentin Jones, Belloc tells us in his Cautionary Tales, Was very fond of throwing stones At Horses, People, Passing Trains But specially at Window-panes. Like many of the Upper Class, He liked the sound of Broken Glass. To this last line is appended the footnote: A line I stole with subtle daring From Wing-Commander Maurice Baring ...”

“... A country humbled by the loss of its imperial role, by its industrial decline compared to other major – and minor – powers, and by the failure of the nostrums prescribed by alternating governments, meets most of the textbook requirements for the growth of extremism. Some profess to see in the monetarist takeover of the Conservative Party, or in the ...”

“... been well served by the teachers and librarians who, in Britain and the USA at least, are still major buyers of hard-cover picture books. The mass markets of cheap annuals and paperbacks are another matter – although the huge increase in the number of titles in soft covers, many of which have already had a long life as library books, heartens anyone who ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... save Venice, by protecting it from pollution and installing a new sewage system. Simultaneously, John Sparrow was also turning his attention to the plight of the stricken city. In one of his major letters to the Times, the then Warden of All Souls addressed the urgent question of Venetian dogshit. He noted with regret the ...”

“... Except for two years as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page ...”

“... to lock on’ (when protesters attach themselves to some immovable object); interfering with major transport works; interfering with ‘key national infrastructure’ – road, rail, airports, harbours, oil refineries and distribution – and printing presses. They also want to give the police the power to stop and search anyone at a protest ‘without ...”