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“... After the origins of humanity, the question people most like to ask about the distant past is: what killed the dinosaurs? By the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago, they had all gone. Their disappearance has long been recognised as abrupt, at least by the leisurely standards of geological time. Nowadays, their extinction inspires and sells books and movies by the dozen ...”

“... Up until the mid-19th century, humanity and the animal world were separated by an unbridgeable morphological void – there was no coherent body of evidence to suggest anything other than the standard Biblical story of human origins. Everything changed, however, in 1856, when the first Neanderthal fossils to be recognised as such were unearthed – just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species ...”

“... Humanity is fissile: everywhere it goes, it forms clans, Yoruba and Yanomamo, Mods and Rockers; so powerful is the urge to diverge, even shared ethnicity is optional. No wonder humanity is so hard to define. Taxonomy, designed to resolve such issues, is helpless where it matters most. Every species of animal and plant is uniquely defined as such on the basis of an objective description of its form and habits ...”

“... more and more converts were won over to this new method of understanding biological relationships. Henry Gee was one of those who hung around the Cranley Arms in South Kensington (‘The Cladist’s Arms’), where the leaders of the ‘British school’ supped more pints of Courage Director’s Bitter than was good for them and rubbished the reputations ...”

“... can itself be traced back to antiquity. In his immensely enjoyable new book, Jacob’s Ladder, Henry Gee concerns himself with the forces ‘that take a formless speck and shape it into what is recognisable as a human being’. It is Gee’s contention that the ‘history of biology can be retold as the story of the ...”

“... hit on the answer: it is just that he has been unable to convince all his colleagues of it. Henry Gee has written an excellent book explaining why this is so. To begin with, the problem of animal relationships is a tough one. The major animal phyla, including the vertebrates, are very ancient: at least 545 million years old – the beginning of the ...”

“... and it haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... actor and a voice as well as a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the ...”

“... While US and European economies faltered, Iran’s soared, buoyed by high oil prices. When Henry Kissinger entreated the shah to freeze oil prices in 1975, he refused, and later cited the US government’s ‘threatening tone’ and ‘paternalistic attitude’. It was time, he argued, for the oil-rich nations of the global South – countries such as ...”

“... turn out to exemplify general tendencies. For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of truth but not too much overt ...”

“... an element of danger about him. Seymour Hersh, in his biography of Kissinger, tells how Nixon and Henry decided at the outset that the way to play the Chinese was to put it about that Nixon was mad, that he might order a nuclear strike at any time: this was, after all, how the West saw the Chinese and it led to a certain exaggerated respect. It’s worth ...”

“... good against the excesses of private gain. His ancestors include such muckraking journalists as Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose Wealth against Commonwealth told the sordid tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of ...”

“... go’ was his repeated mantra. I was travelling with my daughter, Farne, and the filmmaker Grant Gee. Farne had copies of Arthur Sinclair’s original contract with the Peruvian Corporation and the document by which the government in Lima, having defaulted on the repayments of loans taken out for the construction of the railway, and still recovering from the ...”

“... of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of his face, its deep furrows like plough marks crossing a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by ...”

“... and then a gallery saw them and I just began taking windows and putting them in galleries.’Henry Geldzahler, a young curatorial assistant at the Metropolitan Museum, went to visit Warhol’s townhouse to find him working on his earliest Pop paintings:I walked into the studio, we looked at each other and we both started laughing. And I saw on the shelf ...”