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“... Alma Mahler Werfel​ celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out ...”

“... In March 1936, a few days after the German invasion of the Rhineland, Nancy Astor threw a party at 4 St James’s Square. As well as being the first woman MP (elected in 1919), Astor was a legendary hostess. To this particular dinner party she invited various League of Nations delegates, the American and Russian ambassadors, an assortment of English friends and Hitler’s ‘ambassador-at-large’, Joachim von Ribbentrop ...”

“... How do you​ sign off an email? How, when writing to someone who is more than an acquaintance and less than an intimate, do you show that you mean well without being intrusively familiar? There is no common scale to draw on. You can make someone uncomfortable by sending them ‘xox’ in a work email when all they expected was a ‘cheers’. A late friend of mine always signed off ‘all good wishes’ – I felt that hit the right convivial-but-distant note ...”

“... I’ve​ never mastered the art of smiling for a photo. Like many English people above a certain age, my parents had been brought up to believe that it was, if not quite bad manners, then certainly a little vulgar to smile open-mouthed, revealing any teeth. In a well-meaning way, they passed this rule on to me and my sister. As a result, my camera smile was an odd, forced thing ...”

“... He​ does not feed like a mongoose,’ James Irving said of the talking mongoose that had taken up residence – or so it was said – in his remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the early 1930s. Irving told psychic investigators that his family had tried the mongoose – who went by the name of ‘Gef’ – on bread and milk, only to have their food rejected ...”

“... In​ July 1923 at the Lewes assizes, Mr Justice Avory handed an anonymous letter containing some ‘improper words’ to a respectable-looking woman. He asked her if she had ever used such foul language. ‘Never during the whole of my life, either in writing or talking, never,’ she replied. The woman’s father, a retired house painter with a grey beard, was asked whether he had ever heard his daughter use indecent language ...”

“... Not​ many people have heard of Norman Borlaug, but his invention – the high-yield, short-straw wheat that fuelled the Green Revolution – is consumed every day by the majority of humans on the planet. Without Borlaug’s wheat, there would be no modern food as we know it. Everything from sandwiches to pizza to soy sauce to animal feed is manufactured from wheats adapted from Borlaug’s ...”

“... If there was​ one thing Maria Montessori hated, it was play. She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy. This came as a surprise to me. I had the impression – from the hippyish reputation of modern Montessori schools – that the essence of the Montessori method was ‘learning through play’. Indeed, this is the way her philosophy is often summarised, including by her admirers ...”

“... Things being as they are,’ the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote in her 1971 essay ‘A Defence of Abortion’, two years before Roe v. Wade, ‘there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do.’ By third parties, Thomson meant abortionists. In her essay Thomson compared the situation of a woman or girl pregnant against her will to being kidnapped by a group of music lovers and having a famous violinist’s ‘circulatory system … plugged into yours’ because you alone possess the correct blood type to save the violinist from a fatal kidney disease ...”

“... At​ Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral – which started fifteen minutes late, in deference to her own habitual lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends ...”

“... until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’ As Ian Hamilton tells it in Writers in Hollywood, Maeterlinck was sent packing, despite his attempt to improve his output by watching movies for the first time. The hero of The Hive is not a bee; it is beedom, the ...”

“... Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new novel, Either/Or. It’s a sequel to my first novel, The Idiot. Both books are set during my own college years, in the mid-1990s: a time when numerous ...”

“... added sugar at all. Sainsbury’s mustard is 19 times more sugary than the thing it’s emulating. Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Fourth Estate, £12.99) is a brilliant, heartfelt book about this crisis in our contemporary diet. She has an explanation for that mustard. It’s part of a general shift in our eating habits towards flavours ...”

“... Why, in a naturally selected world in which reproduction counts for everything, would a worker bee forego reproduction in order to assist her mother, the queen, in producing more offspring? In Darwinian terms, giving up the chance to breed is the most extreme form of altruism conceivable. Hamilton realised, however, that since we share genes with our ...”

“... a ‘politically corrupt regime’. Such monsters colluded with the treacherous governments of Wilson and Callaghan and their ‘attacks on the living standard of working-class people’. Most of these descriptions are generalised and ritualistic, though there is some more detailed comment on Bob Mellish’s business connections from which he certainly ...”