Writing in these pages last year, Ian Sansom observed tartly that “tattoos became largely unremarkable sometime between Mattel’s introduction of the Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie (Doll N4758) in 2009 and the arrival of Samantha Cameron’s ankle tattoo in Downing Street in 2010” (TLS, August 16, 2024).

When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport.

Donald Trump’s first inauguration as president of the United States was met with protests around the world. More than half a million people participated in the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, 2017.

Donald Trump’s first inauguration as president of the United States was met with protests around the world. More than half a million people participated in the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, 2017.

Iceland before the twentieth century was by all accounts a gloomy place. The turf and driftwood houses in which most Icelanders lived were stuffy and largely windowless; the oil lamps that illuminated them during the long dark winters too weak to light whole rooms. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that a belief in the supernatural flourished.

Astronomers observed the first confirmed exoplanet in 1992. Some 5,900 are now known, in about 4,500 planetary systems, with around 1,000 containing several planets, according to NASA. No life has been detected yet, showing just “how rare our planet Earth still is” and how “the imagination imbued within science fiction can only carry us so far”, notes science journalist Keith Cooper.

All I ever wanted was a pet. Many pets, ideally. As a young child, I was permitted only hamsters and goldfish, and aged eight, around the turn of the millennium, I wept to my mother about the Sony Aibo, fearing that the robot dog would make real ones redundant.

One of artist Vanessa Bell’s earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell “which I liked best, my father or my mother.” Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be “jumping around naked” in the bathroom.

In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

The British Normandy memorial, inaugurated in 2019, overlooks Gold Beach. Whether it was necessary to build it is debatable. There was already a British memorial in Bayeux, but it suffered from the handicap of not being close to a D-Day beach.