“... suppose and admire, and upon occasion celebrate, but do not call in question or discuss.’ Thus Robert Boyle, progenitor of English science, in A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686. Boyle found eight meanings for the word, and pretty much suggested we scrap the lot. No one paid him any heed. Nature is too deeply entrenched in our ...”

“... blank; Gardner just looks like a nice kid from North Carolina who’s got herself in trouble. She may in later life have been scary and fiery company, but she was just essentially too nice, and The Killers couldn’t avoid revealing it. Yet in one extraordinary moment she redeems the entire film. The scene begins like a thousand others. The noble hero at last ...”

“... She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of the ...”

“... in at the thick end of eight hundred pages across eighty chapters, when Hegel says quantity itself may be a quality? When after a book and a half’s worth there is another book’s worth, and more, to come? The modestly titled Story of a Life is in fact only half the story (it’s the first three volumes of a set of six), so that we finish it, if we ...”

“... after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around 250 sailors and soldiers, only 145 men survived the wreck and made it to a ...”

“... Prosperity Krugman dismissed Tyson and other Clinton advisors, including the labour secretary Robert Reich, as mere ‘policy entrepreneurs’, not real economists. His writing from this period betrays the prickly tone of one who has been spurned. But, when compared with Bush, Clinton didn’t seem so bad. The title of Krugman’s new book is a play on ...”

“... on the island and three-quarters of its adult males were or had been convicts.) Thanks largely to Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore (1987), Tasmania is thought of as a convict hell: a place of ferocious floggings and inhuman confinement. So it would become, but only after the transformations in its economy and polity deliberately effected by that second wave of ...”

“... MI6 officer seconded to MI5 who introduced himself as Colin Ferguson and later said his name was Robert McLarnon. Believing in neither name, Duddy called him Fred. The Northern Irish members of the link were relatively optimistic that a peace deal might be possible. The conflict had reached a stalemate: the British could contain the IRA but not defeat it and ...”

“... examination and its associated intelligence tests, with their visual and numerical puzzles, may have suggested that quite clever but not very was a truer estimation – though here again it’s consoling to read Todd, who describes IQ tests as an ‘entirely arbitrary means’ of filtering large groups of applicants, one so crude that every government ...”

“... two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors. Mithras may have been a newcomer in the classical Mediterranean, but he could depend on generations trained in the use of images. It is our lack of that training that makes the tauroctonies so difficult to understand, at least to our satisfaction, which is not ...”

“... large, looked like it might find itself in the grip of a violent conflict over Indigenous rights. Robert Muldoon’s reactionary government had been voted out of office in 1984, and the incoming Labour administration of David Lange did at least begin to take the Crown’s obligations under the Te Tiriti (the 1840 treaty between the British and the ...”

“... Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away ...”

“... that liberals cannot say anything reasoned about the virtues. Such liberals – Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, to a large extent John Rawls himself – suggest that liberals can only be ‘agnostic about the good for man’. The friends of virtue and of care conclude that the liberal tradition offers them no footholds. They look to ...”

“... Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in terrorist outrages and unstoppable new viruses, in the city homeless, in ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, in rising world temperatures and evaporating ...”

“... oeuvre real harm, not so much by causing readers to think less of his character (as readers may have been led to think less of Robert Frost), but simply by deflecting the focus of people’s attention. Rereading Cheever, it’s hard now not to be on the qui vive for signs of how his complicated, compulsively deceiving ...”