“... by Means of Natural Selection. It was immediately recognised as a work of great importance: John Stuart Mill, for example, called it a ‘wonderful feat of scientific knowledge and ingenuity’ and ‘an unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis’. It was also – like Voyage of the Beagle, only more so – an artful work of literature: perhaps the ...”

“... of the practical responsibility falls to three female members of that family. Of her two sons, Stuart, a policeman, thinks she should be in a council home: ‘Grandma had paid her taxes and was entitled and that was that.’ Charlie, a successful broker, is willing to pay the rent for the house where she lives, and to hire a variety of helpers or ...”

“... coats and horses repeat the ruddy tone of the wallpaper and soft furnishings, which the dazzlingly white, textureless paper punctuates and preserves from monotony. In this programme of simultaneous modernisation and antiquation, no other branch of art would have been as serviceable as the sporting print. It is so entirely without pretensions. It does not ...”

“... carelessly frank and ingenious way ... close-cropped, bullet-head, of fair weight, almost quite white; laughing little hazel eyes, jolly hooked nose and most definite mouth; short, short (five feet three or two at the most), swells slightly in the middle – soft, sausage-like on the whole – and ends neatly in fat little feet and hands.’ If the ...”

“... and then only, can I forbid my mind its usual indulgence of floating free. I need to get black on white, words on paper, those formulations known as thought on the page. I shouldn’t go so far as to say that this is painful work. When it is working well, I know none better. But when it isn’t working well it is frustrating, irritating, infuriating. What ...”

“... in World War Two, his distinguishing physical feature is a ‘dissident’ thatch of prematurely white hair. A brilliant rhetorician and provocateur of student action, Marquis is a maverick politically, having left the Party in 1956. The founder of Thought and Action, he has lost control of the journal to a younger clique of more fashionable ...”

“... compete by dancing on ropes. In the published text, he changed the colours to purple, yellow and white; blue, red and green were the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the Garter, Bath and Thistle – coveted prizes in Robert Walpole’s repertoire of patronage and sleaze.This didn’t deter the hack who blustered that Swift’s intention ‘could be no ...”

“... It will also ‘legitimate the cultural place of the theatre in late Elizabethan and early Stuart London’. On the first page it is argued that the entrance of Lavinia, in Titus Andronicus, with ‘her hands cut off and her tongue cut out and ravished’, is Ovidian and Petrarchan in tone (the latter because the way her injuries are described is said ...”

“... acceptable visitors. Mandler correctly identifies Nash’s Olden Time as the late Tudor and early Stuart period, though he could have said more about the long literary tradition of ‘Old English hospitality’, which generated the Victorian lithographs. It originated with the nostalgia of Elizabethan Catholics for the dissolved monasteries; it continued with ...”

“... in which life-forms might not replicate according to natural selection. But they do quote Stuart Kauffman’s definition, according to which a life-form is any ‘autonomous agent’ that can reproduce and carry out at least one thermodynamic work cycle. In other words, it would have to be able to redirect energy so as to ‘pump up’ processes back ...”

“... in the early chapters of the book. At one point, he proposes a mental experiment involving a white map with altitudes marked on it in high relief and ‘each rice-growing core’ with ‘a reservoir of red paint filled to the very brim’. Tilting the map this way and that, and laying it flat again, the spread and concentration of the red ink would mark ...”

“... of their time was spent attacking the other stall-holders. After Wordsworth, Carlyle, Newman, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold spoke up for the liberal university and the higher journalism as natural bulwarks against the tide of commercialism. In LeMahieu’s eyes such figures stand convicted of a cultural élitism which stemmed from their-groundless ...”

“... bitterness which his by then distant political activities had so frequently generated. As with the white cobra in Kipling’s ‘The King’s Ankus’, the fangs had long been harmless, the poison-sacs dried up. Yet Brougham had been a terror and a torment in his time. To Lord Sefton he was ‘the Archfiend’; Lady Grey, in a shrewder assessment, identified ...”

“... brother grew up in a semi-detached house on the southern edge of Glasgow, with their parents, Stuart, a data analyst, and Linda, a nurse turned government adviser. One cold November evening, I sat with Linda in a shelter at the top of her garden looking out towards Ben Lomond. She told me about her daughter, who loved her friends, her golden ...”

“... monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and ...”