Hummingbirds are often thought of as having exceptionally high metabolic rates, but a bumblebee’s is roughly 75 per cent higher

This in turn enabled them to calculate how much energy bees burn in flight: an estimate of about 1.2 kJh-1. That figure may not mean a lot, so let me contextualise by saying that a running man uses up the calories in a Mars bar in about one hour. A man-sized bumblebee (which would, I admit, be pretty terrifying) would exhaust the same calories in less than thirty seconds. Hummingbirds are often thought of as having exceptionally high metabolic rates, but a bumblebee’s is roughly 75 per cent higher.

D. Goulson, A sting in the tale: my adventures with bumblebees (2013), 33

Rain was London’s benison, the absolution for its grit and dust

Williams liked rain. Sunny afternoons on a deckchair in Regent’s Park could be pleasant when he felt like nattering with admirers, but it was rain that he associated with poetry: ‘Caught in a shower of light rain: it was like a mountain mist descending.’ It pleased him that other people were deterred by wet weather, and that the pavements were cleared by a downpour, and that car headlights glittered and were refracted in the puddles, and that afterwards the streets seemed cleansed. Rain was London’s benison, the absolution for its grit and dust. 

C. Stevens, Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams (2010), loc. 5,333

That’s where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap

All problems have to be solved eventually by oneself and that’s where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap because, in the last analysis a man is an island. He may like to communicate but if he cannot it doesn’t kill him. But enough of seriousness, you are on holiday and it’s all whoops and bonnet over the windmill!

C. Stevens, Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams (2010), loc. 4,129

Yess, I can do it, dear, cos I know I go home and say my prayers! I’m pure

Bill Cotton, now BBC head of variety, warned the monologues must be free from double entendres, but Williams took no notice. The night before, he had packed a year’s supply into a return appearance on The Eamonn Andrews Show. Stanley Baxter phoned to scold him – how could a man who boasted of his virginal sex-life sit and flirt with Roger Moore on national television, and call him ‘a great dish’? Williams was defiant: ‘Yess, I can do it, dear, cos I know I go home and say my prayers! I’m pure.’

C. Stevens, Born brilliant: the life of Kenneth Williams (2010), loc. 3,791

I couldn’t stand the plumbing and the garlic

‘The south of Spain,’ Williams remembered later, ‘I thought it sounded rather grand. Only I’d never been anywhere except in the army and, as it turned out, the holiday was a disaster. I’m really terribly insular. I couldn’t stand the plumbing and the garlic.’ 

C. Stevens, Born brilliant: the life of Kenneth Williams (2010), loc. 2,691

He could have straddled the world; instead, he lived all his adult life in a series of apartments along the Euston and Marylebone Road

That notion of innate genius, mysterious and unearned, is at the heart of my fascination with Williams. He was brilliant, an apparently limitless talent – but his career was contained within tight boundaries. He never made millions. He did not conquer Hollywood, nor Broadway, nor Vegas. He did not make TV spectaculars or dramas or sitcoms, though he appeared to be a gift for any of them. The greatest playwrights of the age – Orton, Pinter, Bolt – created roles for him, but his theatre work is largely forgotten. He could have straddled the world; instead, he lived all his adult life in a series of apartments along the Euston and Marylebone Road, and all of the buildings can be glimpsed by taking a 205 bus from St Pancras to Paddington station.

C. Stevens, Born brilliant: the life of Kenneth Williams (2010), loc. 51.

This may overstate the genius of Kenneth Williams, but the rest of the book is clear on the self-inflicted nature of the constraints that did define his career and his life.  

A man starved all his life will never rebel.

A man starved all his life will never rebel. Up north there was no rebellion. No one raised his voice or his hand there. But just let the subject start to eat his fill and then try to take the bowl away, and immediately he rises in rebellion. The usefulness of going hungry is that a hungry man thinks only of bread. He's all wrapped up in the thought of food. He loses the remains of his vitality in that thought, and he no longer has either the desire or the will to seek pleasure through the temptation of disobedience. Just think : Who destroyed our Empire? Who reduced it to ruin? Neither those who had too much, nor those who had nothing, but those who had a bit. Yes, one should always beware of those who have a bit, because they are the worst, they are the greediest, it is they who push upward.

R. Kapuściński, The Emperor (1978), tr. W.R. Brand and K.Mroczkowska-Brand (1983), 113

Germame took bribes and used them to build schools

So the dignitaries started their denunciations in monosyllables, hints, whispers, but then more and more boldly (even if still informally), delicately, dropping hints in conversational lulls - that Germame took bribes and used them to build schools. 

Now just imagine how worried these dignitaries must have been. After all, it was understandable that a governor accepted tributes; all the dignitaries accepted tributes. Power begat wealth, as it had since the beginning of the world. But the abnormality of it was this, that a governor should use these tributes to build schools. And the example at the top was a command to subordinates, which meant that all the dignitaries should give money for schools. Now just for a moment let us admit a base thought. Let us say that a second Germame springs up in a second province and starts to give away his bribes. Immediately we would have a mutiny of the dignitaries, protesting against this principle of giving away bribes. The result: the end of the Empire. A fine prospect-at first a few pennies, and finally the fall of the monarchy. 

R. Kapuściński, The Emperor (1978), tr. W.R. Brand and K.Mroczkowska-Brand (1983), 66

The King of Kings preferred bad ministers

I'll come right out and say it: the King of Kings preferred bad ministers. And the King of Kings preferred them because he liked to appear in a favorable light by contrast. How could he show himself favorably if he were surrounded by good ministers? The people would be disoriented. Where would they look for help? On whose wisdom and kindness would they depend? Everyone would have been good and wise. What disorder would have broken out in the Empire then! Instead of one sun, fifty would be shining, and everyone would pay homage to a privately chosen planet. No, my dear friend, you cannot expose the people to such disastrous freedom. There can be only one sun. Such is the order of nature, and anything else is a heresy. But you can be sure that His Majesty shined by contrast. How imposingly and kindly he shone, so that our people had no doubts about who was the sun and who the shadow.

R. Kapuściński, The Emperor (1978), tr. W.R. Brand and K.Mroczkowska-Brand (1983), 33-34

He didn’t need to be bold any more because he had made himself plenty of power

Babamukuru, I knew, was different. He hadn’t cringed under the weight of his poverty. Boldly, Babamukuru had defied it. Through hard work and determination he had broken the evil wizards’ spell. Babamukuru was now a person to be reckoned with in his own right. He didn’t need to bully anybody any more. Especially not Maiguru, who was so fragile and small she looked as though a breath of wind would carry her away. Nor could I see him bullying Nyasha. My cousin was pretty and bold and sharp. You never thought about Babamukuru as being handsome or ugly, but he was completely dignified. He didn’t need to be bold any more because he had made himself plenty of power. Plenty of power. Plenty of money. A lot of education. Plenty of everything. When you have a lot of anything it makes you feel good to give a bit of it away.

T. Dangarembga, Nervous conditions (1988), loc 934

Real food tastes like dirt, water, and exertion

Over time, the guns and tents and sleeping bags were wrecked. So they learned to tan skins, sew with sinew, hunt with handmade bows, sleep comfortably on the ground and in the open. The salt was the thing that lasted the longest. And after it was gone they discovered that real food tastes like dirt, water, and exertion.

D. Cook, The new wilderness (202), loc 859

Measured in these terms it is clear that during the Wars of the Roses English townsmen were more relaxed than they had been in earlier centuries

From the thirteenth century onwards most towns financed their building operations by being granted the right to levy a toll on goods coming into the town for sale. This toll was known as murage. In the fifteenth century several new sources of financial aid were found, the most popular being the receipt of a grant from customs duties to meet the cost of a sea-port’s fortification. As a crude barometer of the effect of the Wars of the Roses on the outlook of municipal authorities we can make a count at ten-year intervals of the number of towns receiving grants of murage or other forms of financial aid for the same purpose. In 1460 there were nine; 1470, again nine; in 1480 only six, and by 1490 it was down to four. One hundred years earlier the same count shows seven in 1360, seventeen in 1370, fifteen in 1380 and fifteen in 1390. Two hundred years earlier it had been fourteen in 1260, seventeen in 1270, and ten in 1280 and 1290. The totals for these decades, though somewhat artificial, are very revealing: fifty-one in the thirteenth century, fifty-four in the fourteenth and only twenty-eight in the fifteenth. Measured in these terms it is clear that during the Wars of the Roses English townsmen were more relaxed than they had been in earlier centuries, though possibly fractionally more worried than they had been in the previous four decades (1420-50) when the total is twenty-six.

J. Gillingham, The wars of the Roses (1981), 12

It is a custom in England that the victors in battle kill nobody

In the Wars of the Roses casualties were limited precisely because they were civil wars. On both sides the commanders were anxious to win popular support, not lose it by indulging in bloody massacres. Thus one contemporary observer of the wars, the shrewd French politician Philippe de Commynes noted that ‘it is a custom in England that the victors in battle kill nobody, especially none of the ordinary soldiers, because everyone wants to please them.

J. Gillingham, The wars of the Roses (1981), 12

Edward was a deeply unfashionable name in 1239

Edward was a deeply unfashionable name in 1239 – no king or nobleman had been lumbered with it since the Norman Conquest, because it belonged to the side that had lost. Edward was an Old English name, and it sounded as odd and outlandish to Norman ears after 1066 as other Old English names – Egbert, Æthelred, Egfrith – still sound to us today.

M. Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, (2008), 3

Outside Germany, little is known about this. Inside Germany, it is part of almost every family's history.

All in all, by 1950, between twelve and fourteen million Germans had either fled or been forced from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. Most had nowhere to go. Outside Germany, little is known about this. Inside Germany, it is part of almost every family's history.

N. MacGregor, Germany: memories of a nation (2014), 477 

So the whole of Bismarck's career absolutely rested on the longevity of the old man

Bismarck was able to achieve all this not just because he was a shrewd politician, but because Kaiser Wilhelm lived for ninety-one years, as Jonathan Steinberg explains:

'Wilhelm I was born in 1797. Had he lived his biblical three score and ten, he would have died in 1867, before the unification of Germany. Friedrich III would have come to the throne as a youngish man and he would have fired Bismarck. He in fact did not come to the throne in 1867, nor in 1877, nor in 1887, because the old man would not die, and as long as Wilhelm I was there - he died in March 1888 at the age of ninety-one - Bismarck had a job. So the whole of Bismarck's career absolutely rested on the longevity of the old man.' 

N. MacGregor, Germany: memories of a nation (2014), 394

For they are cities free. Where Bismarck has no right to be

As late as the 1880s, even though the Hansa was long gone, it is said that children would chant: 'Hamburg, Lubeck and Bremen. No one can shame 'em. For they are cities free. Where Bismarck has no right to be.'

N. MacGregor, Germany: memories of a nation (2014), 244

If you're planning to run onstage in a gorilla suit and surprise someone, always check first to see whether the person you're surprising has taken so much acid before the show that they are unable to differentiate between a man in a gorilla costume and an actual gorilla

I thought it would be funny if I hired a gorilla costume and ran onstage during their [Iggy Pop and the Stooges'] set  - you know, just adding to the general mayhem and anarchy. Instead , I was taught an important life lesson, which is this: if you're planning to run onstage in a gorilla suit and surprise someone, always check first to see whether the person you're surprising has taken so much acid before the show that they are unable to differentiate between a man in a gorilla costume and an actual gorilla. I discovered this when my appearance was greeted not with gales of laughter but the sight of Iggy Pop screaming and shrinking away from me in terror.  

E.H. John, Me (2019), 332-3 

Do you take a lot of cocaine?

 [Princess Alexandra] had sat politely through the performance, then come backstage, and got the conversation off to a flying start by smiling sweetly and asking, 'How do you have so much energy onstage? Do you take a lot of cocaine?'

E.H. John, Me (2019), 168

What the hell are you thinking? Ridiculous. Makes you look like a bloody fool. Get rid of it.

[Prince Philip, to Elton John:] 'You live near Windsor Castle, don't you?' he asked. 'Have you seen the bloody idiot who drives round that area in his ghastly car? It's bright yellow with a ridiculous stripe on it. Do you know him?'

'Yes, your Highness it's actually me.'

'Really?' He didn't seem taken aback by this news at all. In fact, he seemed quite pleased to have the idiot in question, so that he could give him the benefit of his advice. 'What the hell are you thinking? Ridiculous. Makes you look like a bloody fool. Get rid of it.'

E.H. John, Me (2019), 152-3