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“... the beginning, don’t understand the end.’ In Part II, on the morphology of case, Andrew Spencer considers (among other things) Australian languages in which cases not only correspond to verb-categories such as tense or the syntactical status of the clause, but are themselves given the morphology of verbs. At this point the reader ...”

“... Interviewed by the BBC 25 years after Herbert Spencer’s death, Beatrice Webb, who had known him well, referred to him as Darwin’s John the Baptist. Spencer would have relished the description, which is in many ways appropriate: he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and was responsible for popularising the term ‘evolution ...”

“... Here comes Stanley Spencer with his pram – his bowl-cut – and his crazy-uncle specs – so this must be your childhood Ruby – must be Cookham – must be 19 – 19-what – is nothing black and white – what sort of question’s that – the war has come and gone – let’s call it 1920 and you ten – and look there’s Stanley turning in the churchyard – cherry’s out – the purple buddleia – red admirals – where he unpacks a canvas from his pram – a clever brush – and makes the green grass open up – the graves too split – dry peapods – and the well- dressed dead fly straight to heaven – some do – others tumble on the grass like picnickers – they’re happy – they’re ecstatic – all brave souls – kind hearts – bright sparks – and one’s a girl – a baby – but my mother – I can tell – my mother and your – what’s the word – your little one – your own though not your own – your loved one all those years to come – those years all come – they do – there’s me now – bright spark on the grass – I’m next in line for you – nanny – that’s the word thank you Stanley, have you finished – finished no not finished but the light is finished this light’s finished ain’t it – off we go – go where now – let me think – so many days – you see – here comes my daughter now – she’s your age Ruby – well – the age you were or one of them – feel that – she’s kissed your face – hello is this – it’s not – a goodbye kiss – and not the churchyard either – this high bed – and you – your skin gone threadbare – parched lips moving – soundless – O – you don’t know what you mean – you don’t – but I know what you mean ...”

“... One can find,’ wrote Stanley Spencer, ‘interesting and very nice things in dustbins and incinerators.’ Ferreting about among rubbish heaps struck him as ‘a distinctly entertaining and elevating pastime’ and the beads, scraps of china and old books he disinterred ‘really satisfied my highest thoughts ...”

“... of intellectual ambition. Here are Gay Studies Advanced, Intermediate and also Rudimentary. Colin Spencer’s Homosexuality: A History is the work of a hobbyist, who offers what is essentially a scrap-book of the various ways that homosexuality has been inflected in different periods and cultures. Spencer leaves ‘Analysis ...”

“... 1966, when she was 19, the knicker-throwing debutante met a 27-year-old lieutenant in the Guards, Andrew Parker Bowles. He was handsome, and his parents were ‘excellent in-law material’. His father, Derek, a steward at Newbury racecourse, was a great friend of the Queen Mother’s, while his mother, Ann (nicknamed ‘Rhino’), was the Chief Commissioner ...”

“... made historical inquiry seem peripheral and even irrelevant. Why bother finding out exactly what Spencer and Gillen thought about exogamy among the Aborigines a hundred years ago? Who now cares about Malinowski, R-B, or E-P? The result of all this is that in recent years a number of anthropology departments in the United States have abandoned the teaching of ...”

“... William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, was born ‘in a somewhat furtive manner for a baby of his exalted rank’. In 1790 his father, the fifth Duke, and his mother, the giddy Duchess Georgiana, had been travelling in the Low Countries, where the Austrian threat became such that they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris ...”

“... of being nearly right nearly all the time. Most of his successors have no such defence. Herbert Spencer – who coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ – was in favour of arranging society on Darwinian lines. Not surprisingly, his ideas were popular with Andrew Carnegie and his fellow steel magnates. Konrad ...”

“... firmly and mistakenly that books about the monarchy always sell. The exceptional success of Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story suggested that sycophantic royal biographies were out, and savage royal exposés were in. Hence the commissioning of a spate of Mortonesque knife-jobs. It was also supposed that what the Sun called the Queen’s bum year ...”

“... overtly tabloid, it isn’t entirely obvious what fascinated people so about Diana Windsor, née Spencer, the uneducated, O-level-free daughter of an ancient house, former nanny, Sloane, clothes-horse, playgirl, campaigner, therapist addict. Take the bright lights away and you have a regular messy divorce, friends taking sides, money, adultery, using the ...”

“... said that shopping was what they liked best about the city. In her fashion guidebook, Mimi Spencer exhorts her readers to ‘shop for England … just for the sheer entertainment value of it all’. Suzy Gershman, the American author of Born to Shop: Great Britain, is ‘so enamoured’ of the January sales that she recommends flying in from Cleveland ...”

“... and on the whole exceedingly trusting. A number of the earlier ones were painters, such as Spencer Stanhope, George Howard, Val Prinsep, G.P. Boyce and G.F. Watts, for whom Webb created an unusual house on the Isle of Wight, now destroyed. Victorian painters made good money, and Webb was the main pioneer of the studio house, which involved linking ...”

“... been economic. It is to the surprising, and perhaps ominous, recrudescence of biologism that Andrew Ross devotes some of the most interesting chapters of The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life. Ross makes some shrewd and witty criticisms of recent exclusions by natural scientists into sociobiology, such as those of Richard Dawkins, the behaviour of whose ...”

“... that one of the pivotal moments of the decade was buying your first Chicken Kiev from Marks and Spencer. ‘With a how-to book and a little cash,’ he writes, ‘aspirants could escape the Human Condition, could play-act, be someone entirely new.’ Hard news and current affairs were trifling: advertorial was the main thing. It would not be right to say ...”