“... had never before met the editor of Blaze from Perth, and it was well-known that Sperm’s grant was cut because the editor of Blaze was having a really sick affair with a poetess whose last book Sperm had dumped on; the editor of Blaze, as everyone knows, was a big friend of X on the Queensland Arts Council ... and so on. It may be a big country, I ...”

“... writers ‘deal with issues of life and death’, pointedly excluding the likes of Henry James and Proust. By this standard Han has to be one of the good ones – though it’s hard to imagine McCarthy’s fans gravitating towards her. She, too, is preoccupied by the brutality of the natural world and the state (her novel Human Acts dramatises the ...”

“... campaign was noisy, lively, inventive – a ‘political carnival’, as Lynn Bennie, James Mitchell and Robert Johns describe it in their new book, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum (Routledge, £135). Its ‘innovative campaigning methods’ included ‘campaign stalls, impromptu flash ...”

“... books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and the poet Claudia Rankine’s award-winning Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To ...”

“... or indeed anyone else, he has that faith in time and reason which Macaulay once confessed to James Mill. He shares the Whiggish benevolence that united Macaulay, the Evangelical, and Mill, the Utilitarian, more than their one dispute divided them. And in addition to also displaying a command of large parts of human time and space, Runciman approvingly ...”

“... the villain-in-chief, endlessly execrated, is the Rev. Thomas Burnet. Leading the heroes home are James Hutton and Sir Charles Lyell. What was Burnet’s sin? He was the Judas who supposedly sold out geology to Scripture. In his Sacred Theory of the Earth – which appeared just before Newton’s Principia – Burnet denied what has become the central dogma ...”

“... announcements, Trump issued an executive order seeking to redefine the US constitution’s grant of ‘birthright citizenship’. Until 1868, the constitution was silent on who was a citizen, instead delegating authority to Congress to ‘establish a uniform rule of naturalisation’. Flexing this power in 1790, it invited ‘any free white ...”

“... still in its infancy. In 1717, the Grand Lodge of England was formally established and in 1723, James Anderson, commissioned in 1721 to ‘digest’ the old ‘Gothic’ charges of Masonry, published its modern Constitutions. A Jacobite, the Duke of Wharton, did hold the Grand Mastership in 1722-23, but left – tongue and throat intact – in 1723, under ...”

“... and feelings, and to be aware of themselves. These assumptions can be challenged, but, as William James observed, their discussion is called metaphysics and lies outside the scope of science. Unlike James, cognitive scientists aim to give a thoroughgoing computational account of how the brain constructs and uses ...”

“... have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling ...”

“... the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She was later transferred to entertain his younger daughter, the emotionally, intellectually and physically challenged Princess Anne. This was hardly a plum position: Anne was third in line to the throne with the likelihood that ...”

“... concerns the early days of the project, from Dean Trench’s lecture of 1857 to the appointment of James Murray as editor in 1879. Much attention is given to the personalities: one would like to know why Trench was ‘deeply embarrassed’ by his participation in the Torrijos rebellion (the DNB indicates disillusion rather than personal failings). Herbert ...”

“... the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day and hates getting wet. In The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), the children discover a flying carpet that can take them anywhere in the world: its daily allowance is three wishes. The Phoenix, like the Psammead, is of an awkward but basically ...”

“... clear, is disingenuous: Lee stayed – unlike many of the Clydesiders whose ties to the ILP leader James Maxton were as strong as hers – because she didn’t want to compromise her socialist principles. She believed in fighting for socialism against the enemy, which was sometimes within: ‘I wanted to take part in a political contest where the alignments ...”

“... began as a 16th-century state intervention, an act of internal Scottish colonisation, part of James VI’s attempt to curtail the autonomous power and culture of the Highlands. In 1597 the king and parliament in Edinburgh decided to plant three new towns in the Highlands as bearers of Lowland Scottish values: English against Gaelic, Protestantism against ...”