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Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary: "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. The dinosaur disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now con­tains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons."

What name a genuinely new species is given, though, is entirely up to the discoverer. Hence the existence of Anophthalmus hit- leri, a blind cave beetle named in 1933 after Adolf Hitler. In this context, the recent naming of another beetle after the American president is hardly a hanging offence, although Mr Bush may not be flattered by the company. But when the scientific under­pinning of taxonomy itself is threatened by politics, different questions arise. Last year, for example, there was a nasty row in Turkey between Kurdish and Turkish taxonomists over whose names should apply to some local animals. The Kurds accused the Turks of renaming several species to remove any trace of Kurdishness.

The scientific name of the beetle comes from a German collector, Oscar Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in 1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Adolf Hitler, who had recently become Chancellor of Germany. The genus name means eye­less, so the full name can be translated as "the eyeless one of Hitler". The dedication did not go unnoticed by the Fuhrer, who sent Scheibel a letter showing his gratitude.

£ £ Philosophy, religion, thinking,

wisdom, languages, truth, morality

«You must do the things you think you cannot do," said Eleanor Roosevelt.

Spellbound after visiting Constantinople in 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany wrote to his friend Tsar Nicholas II, «If I had com there without any religion at all, I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!»

The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller «Eats, Shoots and Leavers» comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.

In Ireland people ask St Anthony to help them find parking spaces.

How did Hobbes make so many enemies?

Human ignorance is more fundamental and more consequential than the illusion of understanding.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

William Faulkner, the South's great novelist, wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past".

Nobody thinks a novel can be translated by a machine. Sales of trans­lated fiction rose by more than 600% in Britain between 2001 and 2015, and have been growing strongly in America too.

Time is such a slippery thing. It ticks away, neutrally, yet it also flies and collapses, and is more often lost than found. If scientists agree on anything, it's that nobody knows enough about time.

Crowds are often mad rather than wise.

English is the language on which the sun never sets.

Reality is less whiter than white.

Those of Norse descent who lived through the events of the 820s, would not, of course, have feared the anger of a god they did not believe in. But they might have feared they were witnessing Fim- bulwinter — three summerless years marking the onset of Rag- narok, the twilight of their own gods.

Troublemaker was his middle name.

As a Harvard philosopher, he might have no idea how to tell an elm from a beech.

INTHEBEGINNINGWASTHEWORD, and the word was run together. An­cient texts (like the Greek of the Gospel of John) had few of the devices that tell readers where words begin and end (spaces), which words are proper names (the upper-lower case distinction), where breaks in mean­ing come (commas, dashes, semicolons and full stops), who said what (inverted commas), and so on.

Who can say what order should be used to list adjectives in Eng­lish? Mark Forsyth, in "The Elements of Eloquence", describes it as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and then Noun. "So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word or­der in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac."

Whig histories typically focus on the progress that the state and evangelicals made in forging a Church of England: a history of the winners.

In Mark Forsyth's marvellous book, "The Etymologicon", and largely corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary, feisty, in the sense of "spirited", is derived from "fist" or "feist", meaning a small dog. This in turn comes from the phrase "a fisting hound", where "to fist" means to fart.

The price of being on the wrong side at the wrong time was terrible.

To win an argument, Roman orators taught, first win the good­will of your audience.

One of the grammarians, Lindley Murray, wrote in 1795, in a hugely influential grammar book, that a semicolon signalled a pause twice as long as a comma; that a colon was twice as long as a semicolon; and that a full stop was twice as long as a colon. (Try that next time you read a text aloud.)