1. But palaeontologists at the British natural history museum have uncovered something that had somehow gone unnoticed: for at least the last two million years, the space twixt brow and upper lip in hominids has been, proportionately, shorter and wider in males than in females.

2. And the last land he found, it was fair and level ground,/ About a carven stone/ And a stark sword brooding on the bosom of the Cross, /Where high and low are one,/ And there was grass and the living trees,/ And the flowers of the spring,/ And there lay gentlemen from out of all the seas/ That ever called him King. ‘Twixt Nieuport sands and the eastward lands where the four red rivers spring,/ Five hundred thousand gentlemen of those that served the King.

3. Eternity Take, for example, the husband and wife buried together and described by the 17th–century English poet Richard Crashaw: ‘To these whom death again did wed, This grave‘s the second marriage–bed, For though the hand of Fate could force, Twixt soul and body a divorce, It could not sever man and wife. . . They, sweet turtles, folded lie, In the last knot that love would tie.‘ The limbs of the Lovers of Valdaro are knotted together in death as they were in life — only bones now, but bones still mapping out the shape of love. ¦ SALLY Emerson‘s book, Be Mine, An Anthology For Lovers, Weddings And Ever After, is published by Little, Brown.