“... The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps. As the most visible (and expensive) product of Big Biology, the human genome project has understandably attracted much public attention. The excitement stems not from decoding the genome of ...”

“... his peers. In recent years Bossy has undergone a process of reversion, however. In our dreams we may encounter, disturbingly, old flames of many years ago, or other reminders of the persons we once were. Bossy’s original work, back in the 1950s, was on the French connection: the cross-Channel traffic not in drugs but in Catholicism, and it is to that first ...”

“... and in some of his friendships, such as that with Beaverbrook. Some of his misjudgments in office may have been disastrous, though both books are charitable to him over the Dardanelles fiasco (‘it could have worked’). Many of his Parliamentary interventions were terribly botched. Harold Nicolson thought he could tell when he was about to blow it: I knew ...”

“... To say that nothing preceded it is to claim that God didn’t have to bring it about, indeed may long since have bitterly regretted doing so. From a theological viewpoint, the universe could very easily never have happened. God created it out of love, not need. Since he is complete in himself, the dismal truth is that he does not need us at all, any more ...”

“... the same, Shakespeare, for instance, can’t have known anything at all about Norse myth. Hamlet may, as O’Donoghue claims, go back to the story of Frodi’s mill and the giantess-slaves who grind at a magic stone there, as told in one of the few Eddic poems outside the bishop’s Codex Regius, and Hamlet’s feigned madness ...”

“... whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.’ The tract before the court, he went on, ‘would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character’. Here, couched in Victorian prose, was the erection ...”

“... a ceasefire and unnerving those who have come to realise that the relative calm they are enjoying may hang on the word of someone they fear and despise – and have often underestimated. These events came too late for inclusion in Patrick Cockburn’s book, but they follow the pattern he skilfully sets out in this complex account of the emergence of Muqtada ...”

“... Heidegger to D.H. Lawrence continued to look on science as the death of the spirit. F.R. Leavis may have inveighed against what he called the ‘technologico-Bethamite spirit’, but his Cambridge colleague I.A. Richards drew on psychology and neurology for his theory of poetry. Poetry became a kind of mental hygiene or spiritual therapy, in contrast to the ...”

“... of the Cold War it is time to start again. None of the old assumptions applies any longer. Russia may be difficult to deal with but it is not an enemy: we have relatively normal relations with it. The US now has strategic nuclear primacy over Russia: its chances of disabling Russian nuclear forces with a first strike are estimated at more than 90 per ...”

“... because you can never tell, and both the Arab unity and the Muslim-Jewish co-operation he sought may always have been chimerical. That said, Anderson concludes, ‘it’s hard to imagine that any of this could possibly have produced a sadder history than what has actually transpired over the past century, a catalogue of war, religious strife and brutal ...”

“... guilt, the court held that the pig be ‘strangled on a gibbet of wood’ so that ‘an example may be made and justice maintained’. Pigs were not the only culprits. The medieval courts of Europe, particularly those of France, appear to have dealt with a ‘miscellaneous crew’ of beasts, including ...”

“... or modern, who doesn’t abide by his own teachings. A mathematician who solves a famous problem may be a known scoundrel and liar, but mathematicians don’t come up with ethical injunctions for others to follow. If we were to discover that despite his exaltation of the rational part of the soul, Plato spent his days getting drunk and ogling young boys in ...”

“... more classically Arcadian in its subjects and atmosphere, more expansive in its distances. ‘You may walk in Claude’s pictures and count the miles,’ Wilson declared, but to my eye his management of distance is superior to Claude’s, more subtle in its tonal range and aerial perspective. barr01_3618 Gallery The relative qualities of the two painters ...”

“... Slime is also phenomenological, ‘a thing in between a feeling and a description’. We may agree that mucus and mayonnaise have the same viscosity, but disagree as to whether this makes my sandwich disgusting. Cultural differences show up clearly in food, but they hide in other areas too. Slimy things are everywhere, but there is no universal ...”

“... our view,’ Eberts continues, ‘it was like Gone with the Wind.’ Only English. Some may feel the massacre at Amritsar was gratuitous violence, but that was English too. The Mission (one Oscar), on the other hand, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but failed to pull in audiences. Failed to pull in large enough audiences, that is, in proportion to ...”