“... a 12-year-old son and a sturdy little girl, also called Elizabeth, who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs ...”

“... language that is being forcibly altered to suit what is seen as a new form of knowledge. Hence we may be puzzled to hear of protagonists undergoing ‘textual breakdowns’ and ‘textual crises of identity’, often brought on by ‘transgressive semiotics’, a hazard normally, we are told, ‘gendered as female’. ‘The turning point from the imperial ...”

“... the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any of the lads from school put a hand up my skirt in the handball alley, but the anxiety persisted. Gabriel might show up at any moment and announce that the Holy ...”

“... She is annoyed when her individual circumstances are taken as proof of structural inequality. She may think of herself as an outsider to a certain kind of feminism, to the marketing of ‘self-care’, to the relentless insistence on empowerment, transformation, healing and sharing. The thought of posting online with a hashtag repels her. She ...”

“... seem unaffected, and that some species survive when exposed to industrial pollution, then one may feel that the future as well as the past may well belong to the ants.This group of insects can be described as a hundred-million-year success story. The ants and termites compose one-third of the biomass of the tropical ...”

“... its neglect of quantitative constraints and semantics. The suggestion that syntax and semantics may have evolved independently at first then combined leads to the study of the first shared lexicon, the commonalty of unitary learned symbols that resulted from the convergence of individual expressive choices into a socially accepted pattern, and that preceded ...”

“... Fundamental Issues of Greek Science’ is followed by one on the Chinese ditto. An idle reader may wonder why ‘sciences’ is plural in the titles of the Chinese chapters and singular for the Greeks; and why ‘framework’ is singular in both cases. What do the comparisons between the Eastern and the Western backgrounds show? Well, there is a lot in ...”

“... producing it: that in devious ways social origins reproduce themselves. However oblivious Bourdieu may have been to the contrary force of his own example, he deserves credit for showing that, on the whole, social origins do reproduce themselves – a simple, indignant premise that sent him off to explore a fascinating variety of archives. In Homo ...”

“... no one talks of feeling a bit violated – that is important about Arbus’s work, though it may be truer to say that Arbus’s work more often shows us how inviolable modern human privacy is: however close or close up you get, you never get that close. And that there’s something about modern life that generates fantasies of closeness, of ...”

“... Chartreuse would never really die. Here he is, showing off to a duchess at the Carlton: ‘There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses or the cheaper clarets.’ Clovis has been ...”

“... out of ten people who have experienced depression once will do so again. The idea that melancholia may stimulate, or be the price of, deep understanding and creative endeavour goes back beyond Ficino, and in recent times has been explored by Julia Kristeva (Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia), Kay Redfield Jamison (Touched with Fire) and others. It seems ...”

“... and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away before the Holyrood elections on 1 May 2003, Labour seems in better shape than the SNP: John Swinney lacks the lethal charm of his predecessor, Alex Salmond, and his members went out of control when selecting candidates for the regional list system, ditching the best and brightest. But the polls ...”

“... Kenyans to overlook their tribal differences, is harambee or ‘pulling together’, but ‘Ki-may’ is the cheeky name Wainaina invents as a boy for those indigenous languages which are incomprehensible to him: ‘Ki-may is any language that I cannot speak, but I hear every day in ...”

“... a group of girls away from home which establishes very quickly the possibility of a violence that may or may not be worked on them. ‘The quarters wavering in bottled heat, cots lined up in the big, dark rooms that are pitch black if you walk in out of the sun. Black, quiet, empty, and the screen door banging shut three ...”