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“... Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale. The shale was formed 511 million years ago, in the period when animal life was first emerging. Buried within it Conway Morris found ...”

“... with close kin among the prosperous tradesmen of the town. His uncle was a successful glover and burgess – the same trade and standing as Shakespeare’s father – who ensured that Hobbes, like Shakespeare, received the best education locally available. This was something of a golden age for English schooling, certainly for clever boys like Shakespeare ...”

“... the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ‘trivial, snobbish, shallow and profoundly lacking in judgment’, a toady to the rich and royal, and, according to Nancy ...”

“... almost Stalinist as no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. Coming out I find myself behind Simon Williams, who has been mentioned by his son as one of Ben’s closest friends and am cheered by the possibility that if Ben could play Ambrose, so could Simon – which happily he does. But ‘lovely Ben’ the ...”

“... resonance?) of double lives, whispers, betrayal, running back from the Gang of Four (Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt) to the Apostles; a tradition that is impossible to honour now that there are no secrets left, no one to listen. The spy and his spook-master pay homage to familiar tutorial arrangements: civilised interrogations on park ...”

“... in its common modern sense by Henry Fairlie in the 1950s to denote the aristos who covered for Burgess and Maclean), this time to talk about the way the British ruling class has gone about disempowering the working class, to its own spectacular enrichment. In both cases, Jones quickly and rightly dismisses the stereotype before moving on, but the ...”

“... and whom I have in the past both in print and in interviews taken care to distinguish from Burgess, Blunt and their associates. Cold-hearted, devious and supposedly a good chap, Philby has never appealed to me any more than Graham Greene does, who was his friend and admirer. It’s ironical that even after his departure for Moscow Philby was always ...”

“... with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced Tsvetaeva’s husband to work for the GPU’. Kenneth prefers the Midwest because ...”

“... Frenchmen’. Yet she was subject to intense sexism from critics. A review by the mischief-making Simon Raven in the Spectator in 1966, titled ‘Brophy and Brigid’, divided her into ‘the incomparable’ Brophy, an ‘intelligent writer of clear masculine prose’ – by which Raven seemed to mean mainly her argumentative non-fiction – and Brigid, a ...”