“... charged that Linnaeus had reduced plant sexuality to a mnemonic principle of classification by means of which ‘one man’s experience may be communicated to others, and the objects safely reasoned on while absent’. His system failed to achieve the dimensions of a philosophy, since it did not reveal the ‘constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex ...”

“... terms. Though known as ‘lucky Jack Aubrey’ from a few early prize-money successes, he is by no means generally fortunate, on sea or land, and the nature of his embarrassments are accurately typical of the Navy and of English society at the time. Like Farrell, O’Brian has solved in his own individual way the intractable problem of getting history – in ...”

“... and by far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 ...”

“... emphasises, ‘evolution’ was not a single idea, and the history of thinking about it has by no means been a simple story of the triumph of science over superstition. In the early Victorian period, it was geology, rather than biology, that set the pace. Clergymen were among the many who loved getting out their geological hammers and specimen bags, but what ...”

“... of price, price, price. Most company mottoes and advertising slogans are bullshit. Wal-Mart means what it says: ‘Always low prices’ – a slogan which on some of its stores now simply appears as ‘Always’, in the knowledge that its customers can be trusted to complete the thought. The first Wal-Mart opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, its ...”

“... wasn’t sure that I would have the physical and emotional stamina – or indeed the means – to keep on with the project.’ It was only with volume six, The Stolen Light, that he became confident of his ‘architecture’ and gave the set the general title he had ‘carried so long in my head’. Mehta’s afterword doesn’t touch on this ...”

“... II to concede a constitution. ‘Clearly foreshortened and written in haste,’ is the verdict of David McLellan, the editor of the 1998 World’s Classics edition of the Manifesto, to which Attali adds only that he doesn’t see how the authors had time even to reread the thing, never mind rewrite it more carefully. By the time it appeared in mid-February ...”

“... on one of the Saturday-night talent shows that have changed young Britons’ notions of what it means to be alive.) And yet, despite the millions, the gear, the house in Hollywood, her story happens not to be an account of all the luck and the fun she is having. It would take a whole book on its own to really explain the recovery process I have been ...”

“... Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be ...”

“... Commune up to 1968 displayed ‘the pacification of political manners’, or ‘civil war by other means’. Then came the first ‘modern revolution’ – modern in the sense that ‘it did not aim at taking power.’ And since? In Hazan’s view, a long period of calm, with the city ‘stuck in the continuum of the Bergsonian time of domination and ...”

“... of power in Hungary and Bulgaria.’ If there was a civil war in Poland, I missed it – unless he means the declaration of martial law in 1981. Neither did the ‘mass mobilisations’ and protests of 1989 feel like old-fashioned class war. Which classes? The label might just stick if it were written in neo-Marxist terms: the struggle between a ‘New ...”

“... jokes and puns, and farcical escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David Foster Wallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant cheese, a baby who plays air guitar in his ...”

“... stance to begin with: shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, he told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with Nato, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks – having himself levelled the remains of Grozny in what was billed as a ‘counterterrorist ...”

“... the view gets more weird. If you have a biological sibling, you share at least one parent, which means you are both likely to have large chunks of DNA from that parent in your own genome. With a more distant relative, like a fourth cousin, you have to go further back in the family tree to find a common ancestor – a great-great-great-grandparent. Over the ...”

“... it might have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the model of the Liberal Unionists after ...”