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“... That the human brain is the way it is because it evolved to be that way is what you might call a no-brainer. As Ian Hacking said in the last issue of the LRB, quoting Steven Rose quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Since we use our brains to make up stories, and to make sense of the stories of others, it’s hard to disagree with the idea that the capacity for storytelling is the result of evolution ...”

“... evolutionary psychology stable (ideologically aligned with Wilson) this year is The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller. It’s subtitled ‘How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature’, and the basic idea is that ‘the richness and subtlety of modern human psychology reflects a legacy of minds that evolved, like the peacock’s tail and the ...”

“... the National Gallery, Making Colour (until 7 September), illustrates the characteristics and use by painters of the principal types of pigment, also showing the changes made possible by the introduction of new types of paint after 1800. Most of the exhibits are drawn from the gallery’s own holdings, with a few loans from ...”

“... as some pay more taxes, both absolutely and proportionally, to fund government services. There can be no doubt that the Coalition policy on student debt is ‘progressive’ in the sense that some will pay (back) more than others depending on how much they earn after graduation. But how progressive? The repayment scheme seems to ...”

“... stealth weaponry, except that in the case of the Mouret dress, obviously, the idea is not to be invisible, but the most spectacular creature in the room. ‘The dress is a tool,’ as Mouret himself has put it. ‘And a tool has to work.’ The ‘Galaxy’ dress on the catwalk (2005). The idea has been much developed since, ...”

“... It appears to have been designed in order to provide cover for the military surge being plotted by General Stanley McChrystal, the new white hope of a beleaguered White House. McChrystal seems to have inverted the old Clausewitzian maxim: he genuinely believes that politics is a continuation of war by other means. It was ...”

“... When,​ on his 69th birthday, David Bowie released Blackstar, arguably his best record for 35 or even 40 years, it looked for a moment as if he might be hitting his stride again. His previous album, The Next Day, which came out in January 2013 after ten years of near silence, had a few decent songs on it, but a fair bit of padding too, and for all its surface insistence on the future (‘and the next day and the next and another day’), it looked nostalgically back to the 1970s, from the palimpsest sleeve design, incompletely erasing the cover of Heroes, to the elegiac single ‘Where are we now?’, with its deceptively banal evocation of Bowie’s time in Berlin (‘Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz ...”

“... of the Costa Concordia, the stricken cruise ship was being freighted with allegorical significance by the Italian and international media. On the most obvious reading, the role of Silvio Berlusconi at the helm of the Italian ship of state is taken by Francesco Schettino, the hapless captain who says he didn’t mean to ...”

“... Donald Rumsfeld fumed, offering a figure of $50-60 billion, some of which he said would be supplied by America’s friends. Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, told Ted Koppel on Nightline that postwar Iraq could be rebuilt for $1.7 ...”

“... were, with reason, displeased. It is hard to see how any movement could have been sustained by someone so liable to bite the hand that fed him. His novel The Apes of God doesn’t just mock the artistic competition, but also some of those who had given him money when he sorely needed it. ‘Froanna (Portrait of the Artist’s Wife)’ (1937) All ...”

“... a bit like his asylum legislation – firm and fast, and maybe if Milosevic is very lucky, it’ll be fair. But if you count from the beginning of the wars in Yugoslavia, there’s less to celebrate, even though the West has got its man. The imputation of ‘war crimes’ has its basis in fact, but also in opinion. And where extravagant kinds of cruelty are at ...”

“... entrance in the Whitechapel Gallery’s front on Whitechapel High Street has been open to passers-by; there isn’t even a step to interrupt the level way from footpath to gallery. It has never been intimidating. It was made for the use and pleasure of people who live and work nearby, but it is also – and always has been – an institution of national ...”

“... in the press and are entered for prizes. Which is why, over the years, book cover design ceased to be an offshoot of book design (where typographers do their stuff) and became a graphic arena in which art directors commission all sorts of specialists. Photographers, illustrators, calligraphers, collagists, model-makers and typographers, singly or in ...”

“... bestrafte Brudermord soon after its first appearance. Certainly once Shakespeare was naturalised by the Schlegel-Tieck translation and others in the early 1800s as ‘the third German classic’, the status of his Wittenberg-educated prince as a national allegory in waiting was assured. In a poem of 1844 Ferdinand Freiligrath lamented that ‘Deutschland ist ...”

“... misreading) the Quran, and making interminable speeches to his acolytes, possibly punctuated by bursts of insane laughter. It’s unlikely that the forthcoming book by bin Laden’s first wife and fourth son, which emphasises his love of gardening and the World Service, will do much to change that.* Even Blofeld had a ...”