“... its beak was ‘crooked’ or ‘streight’; then, if straight, was the fowl large, medium or small in size? If medium, was its beak strong and thick, or short and small? Through this process of elimination, the reader would eventually be guided towards the smallest groupings, with the final criterion prompting ...”

“... reception of The Orators when it appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as ...”

“... it is just where we would expect the words ‘Aet. suae’ next to the sitter’s age, and maybe a small heraldic badge to indicate his lineage. This is the painting which has become known as the Sanders portrait, after Thomas Sanders, the man who in 1908 took it to Marion Henry Spielmann, author of the pioneering Portraits of Shakespeare (1907), claiming that ...”

“... for concept albums full of ‘great mates’ from the 1970s; songs about Bigfoot and snowmen and Stephen Fry reciting daffy gibberish; unadventurous marking-time remixes of old material. Someone, in sum, who displayed every symptom of having let zero new music into his manor house for twenty or thirty years. I’m not convinced our huffy Rock Bloke would get ...”

“... I imagined would be totally dark, to cure the fault. He took me down to the cellar, but it had two small windows, and when I emerged a few minutes later, explaining that unfortunately it was not dark enough for my purpose, he seemed slightly offended: so his cellar wasn’t good enough. He handed us our drinks rather grumpily. I asked about the possibility of ...”

“... strike on the Syrian reactor in 2007. But we have to wonder whether his resort to Sarin gas on a small but verifiable scale is intended to make Western powers shudder at the consequences of his regime’s unravelling. It’s clear enough why Obama decided to end Bush-style wars against alleged state sponsors of terrorism. But why did he authorise an ...”

“... intrusion of the executive power into the judicial. But it has proved its worth in the small but crucial series of cases which have revealed a procedurally unappealable trial to have been a source of substantive injustice. The law has a self-protective tendency, of course, both because its practitioners think (understandably) that they know more ...”

“... of belonging in absence without being threatening; it may even allow you to become the centre of a small community of your own; suitable candidates for this role would be an admiring younger brother, or a young and loving wife whose humble social background and limited education guarantee that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious ...”

“... of work. After the enormous press coverage of A Brief History of Time, all the world knows that Stephen Hawking has motor neurone disease, can speak only with a computer-synthesised voice controlled by the few fingers that he can move, and fills the same Cambridge chair as Newton did. The 14 essays of the new book, together with a Christmas Day radio ...”

“... she might as easily have been a scientist, like her father (an entomologist) or her brother Stephen (an astrophysicist). She shares her father’s despairing ecological awareness, together with her brother’s logically detached interest in the nature of time. Both concerns are evoked in childhood memories of strenuous field trips in the Canadian ...”

“... of objective’: ‘We all want socialism some time, but some are more impatient than others.’ Stephen Haseler’s approach is very different: no grass-roots research for him. He was active in support of the Social Democratic Alliance, which, he claims, attracted considerable publicity in the mid-Seventies for its ‘robust condemnation of left-wing ...”

“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr’s thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness ...”

“... What is​ a ghost?’ Stephen Dedalus asks in Ulysses, and promptly answers his own question. ‘One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.’ Not a figure who is entirely unreal, just one who has become a little faint, lacking in physical immediacy. Perhaps someone who lives in the memory only, not an inconsiderable form of life after all ...”

“... own businesses (since Victorian and Edwardian cities tended to be governed by manufacturers and small businessmen). Public or private: which is better? As Millward notes, almost all comparisons end up as inconclusive. The political choice will always be made for reasons external to the enterprise itself. Turning to the social services, Marguerite Dupree ...”

“... historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely the kind of detail Kenyon enjoys. Some room might have been found for Sir Henry Mame’s genius, even while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use could ...”