“... of English poets as readily as he uses ‘Neo-Classic’ of the French, though with a more refreshing air of prelapsarian innocence. For he knows that in France the value of the word, and even the existence of the thing, have been questioned, and he intends to assert both. Not for him, however, the convenient imprecision of approximate ...”

“... could come out of a life of moaning and muddle – not even the rag-and-bone shop of the heart, more like the tiff and dither at the shopping mall. And deploring it because after all he had created and sustained a Christopher Isherwood who was not this one, who managed to leave this one behind. In his 1954 Foreword to his Berlin Stories (first published as ...”

“... all the same molecules but no chicken. Nor can one pick out a distinctive position by Mayr’s more tasteful celebration of organisation. Organicism holds that some of the properties of the living system are ‘emergent’, i.e. in Mayr’s phrase, they ‘could not have been predicted from a knowledge of the lower-level components’. Everything turns ...”

“... mountain slope and come to the divide, where you look over at the beginning of a thousand miles or more of desert, stand in patches of deep snow from the winter before and look at a terrain that receives only a few inches of moisture a year. In most of California, all water flows west to the Pacific, including that of the western slope of the Sierra, but on ...”

“... the virtues of the Irish, as our father did. We were amused at this and often said, “Papa is more Irish than Mama and he never saw Ireland.” ’ Irish-Americans seem especially proud of their success, but they also cling to their feisty underdog image – even though there are 45 million of them. The political machine Moynihan described may no longer ...”

“... the very project of standardised diagnosis, especially of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. More generally, it opposes the biomedical model of mental illness, to the exclusion of social conditions and life-course events. On a quite different score, Allen Frances, the chief editor of DSM-IV, has for years been blogging his criticisms of the modifications ...”

“... in the wood, his blood will not be traced while I live. The dimensions of the poem are all the more fully revealed if it is seen in relation to another mysterious lyric by Thomas Hardy which also exposes us to a sort of hallucinatory experience: One without looks in tonight   Through the curtain-chink From the sheet ...”

“... not being able to find out all about Paul Revere and how the Revolution began. Some books promise more than they deliver: Paul Revere’s Ride promises less. The famous ride is only a minor part of the book, which is a basic work about the outbreak of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord. The British commander-in chief, General ...”

“... neck), he had plenty to swear about. Kirsten Drotner has written a serious book about a subject more often approached with snootiness or levity: children’s ephemeral reading, its purposes and effects. She cautions us against judging the bulk of it unduly edifying to start with, or unduly obnoxious once the ‘penny dreadful’ type of paper had caught ...”

“... of under 20" it was certainly dryish. On the other hand, Professor Alexander Agassiz (son of the more illustrious Louis) had suggested that rainfall increases as cultivation and building disturb the electrical currents in the surrounding atmosphere, while Hardy W. Campbell, billed in the Milwaukee Road pamphlets as ‘the noted farming expert and inventor of ...”

“... less so in Southern Europe. France, indeed, seems to have been divided. Languedoc had larger and more complex households, especially in the mountains, than the rest of France. In spite of this important fact, the development of the Western European family can no longer be seen in the particular way which has been fashionable for the last generation, not even ...”

“... profound idea, but it has become what I think it always really was – a psychological cliche, no more than a fancy synonym for ordinary human confusions. Certainly Day-Lewis had his share of those during his life, but they don’t compose a significant pattern. A different shape is suggested by another phrase from Day-Lewis’s writings. In the preface to ...”

“... the concerns of anxious parents may not work, but listening to them, or seeming to, can cause more harm. In 1998, the French government temporarily suspended a school Hepatitis B vaccination programme to reassure the public that it was taking seriously (spurious) concerns about a link to multiple sclerosis. Vaccination rates fell, and even French doctors ...”

“... an Anglo-Spanish alliance. It was very much Gondomar’s own project, but James had proved far more enthusiastic than Philip. James now learned that the Spanish Government was planning to undertake a major naval expedition against the Muslim corsairs of Algiers and offered to contribute a number of warships to the expedition. British warships were as ...”

“... of retreating Iraqi columns in the first Gulf War, and after Abu Ghraib, such questions became more urgent; but you are more likely to ask questions about what you see than what you don’t. The non-circulation in the Western world of documentary footage of dead Iraqi civilians, and now of those Afghan villagers visited ...”