“... first combustion engine motor-car service was introduced by the New Zealand Postal Service. For more than twenty-five years, the fate of the Lake Taupo was unclear. Then, in 1930, Jack Dennet, a farmer and amateur philatelist in Lincolnshire, discovered it in one of his old albums. Times were hard for English agriculture and Dennet was in trouble, having ...”

“... name, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – turned into something much more ambitious: a comprehensive peace settlement for Europe. Two conferences in 1945, at Yalta and Potsdam, had tried to arrive at a postwar settlement but instead made plain major differences between the Soviets, on the one hand, and the British and ...”

“... and persuades one of her friends to invite him to a salon so that she can meet him. But Herzog is more worldly than Ganna will ever be able to bring herself to believe. He’s charmed, at first, by her bookish eccentricities, but feels compelled to marry her only when he finds out that she comes with a dowry of eighty thousand crowns. He’s also sceptical ...”

“... Ritz in Paris in January 1918 when he met the beautiful, patrician American divorcée Linda Lee Thomas at a breakfast marriage reception. Porter was living well at the time on ‘Grandfather’s tick’, as he called his inheritance; but Linda was ‘rich-rich’. She was eight years older than him, with fabled taste and impeccable manners, and counted ...”

“... earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum. We know how to ride a bicycle, but we can’t write down how to do it, at least not in a way that allows non-cyclists to read our instructions, get on their bikes and ride off. We can reliably pick out a familiar ...”

“... under the waves. Roberts cites evidence that Redgrove’s ‘“cuddly” sessions with Nan were more than usually erotic’. He loved being wrapped in her skirts, and would be haunted by her sexual confessions and accounts of her menstrual tribulations. As he got older, Redgrove, conscious of Oedipal narratives, came to mythologise all this. He recalled his ...”

“... logic. Mind you, its relentlessness doesn’t render it faultless, and at times there even is more relentlessness than logic. Freud in particular has become Szasz’s bugbear; the anti-psychoanalytic psychoanalyst is no longer able to view this genius’s work dispassionately. While he is right, of course, in suggesting that Freud played a founding role ...”

“... main thread of the tale is a travel-book, but around this cluster a number of other themes: the more or less eccentric persons met en route, some love-complications, the bees themselves and the details of their nurture, a good deal of natural history, Darwinian speculations and their impact on an enterprising field naturalist. The group soon run into the ...”

“... wholly physical or material in nature.’ Strawson’s argument builds on arguments made famous by Thomas Nagel. According to Nagel, no amount of purely physical information about what goes on in a creature’s brain (he used a bat as his example) can tell us ‘what it is like’ to be that creature. In this sense, objective physical science radically omits ...”

“... of Beauties of Sterne, the Wit and Wisdom of Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot’s Sayings, or the Thomas Hardy Calendar, and the few who have actually looked inside such volumes will have done so only because the ‘real’ copy of the novel they were seeking had already been taken out of the library. Trained in a system which encourages the dutiful reading ...”

“... or imprison anyone who practised without its permission, imprisoned a Cambridge-trained physician, Thomas Bonham, for practising in London without the college’s licence. Giving judgment in his favour on his claim for false imprisonment, the chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, fastened on the impropriety of allowing a regulatory body to impose fines which went ...”

“... the short-story writer, whose little dyspeptic jolts are sharp and entertaining – was nothing more than a high-functioning literary troll. You almost feel her perched on your shoulder as you read, jeering at you for wanting to enjoy fiction. ‘Oh, do you want your characters to be likeable? Do you want a story? Are you bored? Do you want some ...”

“... of swine were nearing maturity, and life was going to be a whole lot different and a hell of a lot more ominous for anyone who believed in the guarantees of the Constitution of the United States. I remembered that crazy night in Washington a few days ago, right after I heard that Magic had to leave the Lakers because he tested positive for the HIV virus. The ...”

“... to be both rackety and self-preoccupied. This he doubtless knew too, and there is something more than touching in this comment from his journal: Ida finds subtle and deep reasons for admiring The Fountain. I quickly suppressed my almost Pavlovian sneer at Charles Morgan, and realised that what she found in the book is the thing that matters. (Not that ...”