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