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“... Deep​ beneath the headquarters of the Linnean Society, in Burlington House on Piccadilly, is a bomb-proof room built at the height of the Cold War to protect the collections of the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, more commonly known by his Latinised name, Linnaeus. Along with Linnaeus’s books and manuscripts, and his collections of insects and shells, the strongroom houses his herbarium of some fourteen thousand plant specimens, the basis for the Species plantarum of 1753 ...”

“... in which Johnson was unafraid to publish opinions at variance with his own. His friend Samuel Paterson’s Joineriana was a miscellany of anecdotes, aphorisms and his own tedious pensées, including his view of homosexuality as a ‘detestable and unmanly lust’. This was not an unusual position at that date, but ...”

“... The term ‘honour killing’ entered the British legal system in 2003, when Abdullah Yones pleaded guilty to killing his 16-year-old daughter Heshu. Accounts of the case vary but certain facts are clear. The family had fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 – in London the father worked as a volunteer for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the William Morris Academy in Hammersmith, where she was a pupil, Heshu repeatedly expressed her fear of a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her ...”