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“... The vessel was the bark Endeavour; the commander was the bluff, 39-year-old Yorkshireman James Cook, who was also an able astronomer. No one had thought to add natural history to the workload, but Banks got wind of the plan and thrust himself forward. He secured his place on the Endeavour by pulling strings – Lord Sandwich, a former first lord of ...”

“... course, an empiricist; worse, to his detractors, this was empiricism in a silly hat with a party horn. But he was highly regarded in the Anglosphere, and had a strong francophone following, especially in his late years, when his work was anchored by climate change. In France environmentalist activism – ecology – had taken off in the late 1960s. It had to ...”

“... for France was deep and dangerous. Like many of their kind, they never quite put it behind them. James Neugass, another American impelled to Spain by his convictions, fetched up in a world apart from the propaganda parlours frequented by the Orrs. War Is Beautiful, the diary of his five months as an ambulance driver (November 1937 to April 1938), is surely ...”

“... But post-Cuba events like America’s Vietnam intervention, the Prague Spring, the drama in the Horn of Africa, the Cuban appearance in Angola, the Soviet reach towards the status of a global naval power, Solidarity in Poland, Afghanistan and Nato’s ‘dual-track’ decision to deploy new missiles in Europe – to downgrade all that to the category of ...”

“... visiting hour, entered the first house she found open, and there, in a voice rivalling the horn, published all the matches intrigues and divorces she had heard of; predicted as many more; descanted on the shameful behaviour of the women and the scandalous profligacy of the men; wondered what the world would come to – then bawled a little on public ...”

“... than anything the princes of Europe could hope to launch – and not to proceed around the Horn of Africa, Andreas Vesalius, teacher of anatomy in Padua, had published De humani corporis fabrica, that monument to the conviction that ‘the violation of the body would be the revelation of its truth.’ There he stands insouciantly before Death on the ...”

“... outlined could be unbearable in the hands of any writer less sensitive than Elizabeth Bowen. Henry James had a similar theme on his hands in The Wings of the Dove. He cooled the cruelty of it by intellectualising its moral problem. Colette could take any amount of cruelty on the chin and in her hard-bitten way grin at it like a mauled boxer. With E. Bowen ...”

“... of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of ...”

“... a typically deadpan passage in his autobiography: One guy did one of Pan. Pan played his little horn and all the women followed him. He’d take them into a cave and ball them, and then the women would disappear. They’d never find them again. I had Pan put on my left forearm, and then – I’ve always liked Peanuts – a guy put Snoopy and Linus inside ...”

“... far from human habitation – Barrow in Alaska, Alert in the Canadian Arctic, Ushuia near Cape Horn, the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, in Antarctica near the South Pole, and others – set up after the International Geophysical Year of 1957 raised the alarm about the atmosphere. Cape Grim is squarely in the track of the steady westerlies known by sailors as ...”

“... allusive folklores’: ‘It could be a leaf falling from a tree, the blast of a car horn, some children playing ball in the plaza, the colour of the sky at dawn.’ (Off the top of my head, a song for each of his four examples: ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Good Day Sunshine’.)Mick ’n’ Keith ...”

“... a loose improvisation session that turned into four minutes of stripped-down funk – no lush horn section or chorus of backing singers – so tight that James Brown lifted Alomar’s riff. Bowie was moving on from Young Americans even before he’d finished making it. One reason for his restlessness, extreme even by ...”

“... when she saw a vision of Jesus she should regard it as diabolically inspired. She should make the horn sign to ward off evil and spit in the apparition’s face. You wonder if this advice would have placated the rationalist opponents of whom the church was so afraid – would they have found the auxiliary bishop even funnier than the would-be saint? To Gemma ...”

“... start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her ...”

“... or, in the view of people with dogs or cats, for dogs or cats. In 1792 the Scottish philosopher James Anderson noted that ‘it’ indicated ‘a high degree of contempt’, suggesting instead the gender-neutral pronoun ou, then common in Gloucestershire dialect. Kentucky’s 1850 Constitution declared: ‘The right of the owner of a slave to such ...”