“... be modified by its immediate environment – in this case, soil pH. Many other instances are even more striking. The spine of the translucent water flea Daphnia shortens and ultimately disappears if it is bred for generations in polluted water, only for the long spines to reappear in the offspring of spineless Daphnia removed to clean water. There are ...”

“... be perplexed by the drama but in the end reassured that his own diagnosis is correct: we need more honest discussion of our differences. Graff sounds very much like John, who, in his losing battle to save his skin, insists to Carol: ‘I don’t know that I can teach you about education. But I know that I can tell you what I think about education, and ...”

“... a decisive historical event be commemorated? In the history of the British Isles no event has been more decisive than the Revolution of 1688. It defeated a vigorous attempt to impose royal absolutism, and secured the principle of Parliamentary consent. It made possible the emergence of free speech and of an independent judiciary. It was the critical episode in ...”

“... of a great good place to write. Friends and acquaintances pop up for a paragraph and drop out: Thomas Wolfe, Gary Cooper, millionaire sportsmen – a parade of guests at Key West who booze, fish, admire the great man and leave. To Reynolds’s Hemingway nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read ...”

“... Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed ...”

“... tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval pilgrimage. Another milestone was the embrace of the bicycle in the 19th century, which for the first time made independent travel possible for millions of working people. The earliest known written account of ...”

“... find his work cool, elegant, witty, zeitgeisty, disturbing, humane and maybe deep. Those who care more about the words than the visuals, however, will tend towards the sniffy. They will find Coupland shallow, trendy, incoherent, sentimental, kitsch. As usual, there’s truth on both sides. Coupland (born in 1961 on a West German airbase; moved to Vancouver in ...”

“... years in a succession of mental hospitals, ‘she is told: “Your delusion is total, and all the more dangerous and incurable in that you speak just like a person who is fully in possession of her reason.”’ The situation is no less Kafkaesque a century later. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’, published in a 1973 issue of the journal ...”

“... rice, canned peaches (imported from Michigan) and oatmeal. The new dining-hall itself was no more appropriate: instead of cool thatch, it had asphalt shingles and galvanised metal and a low roof that trapped the heat. Ford had always wanted to remake the world by integrating factory life and farming in a modern Arcadia. In the 1920s he tried to buy a ...”

“... that foreign observers viewed with a mixture of condescension and respect. Many Germans reacted more bitterly. Gervinus, Freiligrath and Börne were among the writers who likened Germany to Hamlet, a comparison instantly understood in a country that had come to regard Shakespeare as one of its own. Germans knew all about des Gedankens Blässe – the pale ...”

“... Textbook histories​ used to claim that independence in Africa was more or less complete by the mid-1960s. Decolonisation had lifted the white man’s burden and allowed African activists to strike out on their own – with a ceremonial nod to their European benefactors. But if this characterisation was absurd, so was the notion that colonial rule in Africa was an anomaly by the 1970s: millions of people, South Africans and Zimbabweans among them, were still battling white minority rule, and the struggle was becoming more intense as the Cold War drew on ...”

“... of Fire, wild-billowing, enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue licks at the very Stars.’ When Thomas Carlyle wrote these words in the 1830s, few people in the West doubted that the event he was describing, the French Revolution, counted as among the most important in human history. Some saw it as a deliverance, others as a catastrophe, but they agreed ...”

“... articles of commerce – 50,000 new titles a year, half a million titles in print, ten million or more stored in the copyright libraries. Even following the career of a single edition of a single book, as Darnton did, required a huge investment of scholarly time: 14 years as he reckoned. Most academics want a quicker return than this. As careers are rewarded ...”

“... a priori knowledge is knowledge as to ethical value ... We judge, for example, that happiness is more desirable than misery, knowledge than ignorance, goodwill than hatred, and so on. Such judgments must, in part at least, be immediate and a priori. Like our previous a priori judgments, they may be elicited by experience ... But it is fairly obvious that ...”

“... firm against vogues and panaceas, musical cocktails of all kinds, his work is proving rather more important than Schoenberg’s to composers at the century’s end. It is impossible to think of Sibelius’s music as in any way factitious, despite Simon Parmet’s claim that he used Golden Section proportions, just as Bartók and Debussy are supposed to ...”