“... Another ‘myth’ is that evolution has been ‘progressive’. This idea may have been inherited, as the authors suggest, from the Victorian concept of social evolution: but surely it is now possible to agree that in the 3000 million years of evolution from the earliest known bacteria to mammals and flowering plants there has been a ...”

“... experience. The future is something which we fear, even if it does still titillate the ear. This may reflect an imaginative paralysis of our causal understanding or it may reflect simply an improvement in our intellectual judgment. (It is hard soberly to imagine a human future at any point in time which did not offer some ...”

“... grave.) For those who see Wittgenstein as the creator of a great new direction in philosophy it may come as a shock to learn that he did not regard himself as an original thinker. In 1931 he wrote: I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightaway seized on it with ...”

“... a rebuttable presumption in favour of any method of procuring organs for transplant. The rebuttal may take the form of an argument against a particular method: against, for example, the suggestion that we should randomly kidnap people off the street to harvest their organs. But the burden of proof lies on the opponents to find some such argument; if those ...”

“... carves the rail, Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail. You can’t make an omelette, Marvell may be hinting, without breaking eggs, though on the other hand – and there’s usually another sleight of hand with him – he may be ironising the English revolutionaries when he shows how the mower The edge all bloody ...”

“... are as much at home in Jane Austen’s dressing-room as are Dostoevsky and Scott Fitzgerald. This may be all to the good, though it leads him to such remarks as that Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘gay resilience in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many English ...”

“... On Level Three, judges review the actions of ministers and other public authorities and may invalidate those actions on the ground that they are not authorised by statute or are procedurally defective. Such review may control the way ministerial powers are used and may disallow ...”

“... have changed. What they write can be challenged by facts. A new X-ray or a contemporary inventory may destroy the argument a group of paintings was chosen to illustrate. Critics, by contrast, invent categories which facts cannot invalidate. For example, Kenneth Clark’s distinction between the naked and the nude stands as long as we agree that pictures of ...”

“... to a decisive refutation; the reader is not left thinking, apropos of his critics: ‘Whatever may be the truth of the matter, it cannot be that.’ This is not to say that the book is not of value. Chomsky is surely right in thinking that there has been a persistent misunderstanding between himself and many of his critics, among whom are numbered ...”

“... men of solidly commercial good sense. They must have thought the claim absurd in so far as they may have noticed it, and after them the colonial decades soon thoroughly established history in equatorial Africa as having begun, in any sense to be taken seriously, with the advent of Christianity as well as Commerce during the 1840s. Save to a few ...”

“... refuted the conclusion of the argument from design, without challenging its premises. Nature may be well designed, much as Darwin’s creationist predecessors thought, but good design doesn’t require a designer. Thus John Maynard Smith once defined biological adaptations as the sorts of trait that natural theologians would have mistaken as evidence for ...”

“... form of trying to make philosophy sound like an extension of science. Most scientists, though they may find the history of science interesting, do not think that it is of much use for their science, which they reasonably see as a progressive activity that has lost its past errors and incorporated its past discoveries into textbooks and current theory. The ...”

“... be repeated uncritically for the next forty years. But he sounded a note of caution even so. These may have seemed like persuasive arguments for capitalism at a time when Europe was riven by pointless dynastic wars. But when the ‘reality of capitalist development was in full view’, the idea that ‘men pursuing their interests would be forever ...”

“... the novel, the dominant literary form of the modern age.’ If we consider these claims, we may agree that Harrington’s influence was a consequence of the experience of 1640-60, for his work, like the writings of Filmer and Hobbes, was a response to the crises of that time, though it would not have been what it was had he not also drawn so fully on ...”

“... best novel yet. Certainly it is his most ingenious. But this familiar way of putting things may contain a mistake, a mistake which is part of the subject-matter of Roth’s book. ‘Best novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The ...”