“... and indecisive, could anyway not have stopped it – in his negative role, Gorbachev had less weight in the matter than Attlee in the independence of India. The arms reductions that followed are a more authentic merit, though one of direction rather than anything near completion. If they are one-sided, their terms simply acknowledge the realities of ...”

“... So meticulously thorough is Griffin that at times the material seems to be cracking under the weight of the scholarship brought to bear upon it, as when, for example, he subjects Russell’s undergraduate paper on epistemology to painstakingly detailed critical scrutiny. On the other hand, this attention to detail pays off in his interesting attempt to ...”

“... a thorough overhaul, not least of the underlying code: the old architecture, groaning under the weight of traffic, had been crashing, often for several hours at a time, on a daily basis. Meg Whitman joined as CEO in March 1998. Educated at Princeton and Harvard, she had previously worked for companies including Procter & Gamble (where she famously dedicated ...”

“... their hearts not yet very obviously revelling in their proper course but still detained by the weight of year-round wreckage. As they emerged from their car, a local steel band tried to add lightness, and cover a few boos, with a rendition of ‘Congratulations’, a song once sung by Cliff Richard to remind people that ...”

“... a retired policeman tells Beckett) and relied for crowd control on pushing and shoving. Sheer weight of numbers eventually beat them; pickets, including Arthur Scargill, had travelled long distances. Heath’s government was humiliated and inside the Tory Party the scar lasted for years. Beckett quotes Thatcher from her memoirs: ‘For me what happened at ...”

“... and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their paymasters (Richard Burton, for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was ...”

“... to have been something in the air (or perhaps in the water) of Oxford which fuelled eccentricity. Richard Corbett appears in grey modern histories as the efficient, ambitious churchman whose succession of preferments put Burton in the shade. Yet Corbett, whom we might begin to think of as a cold politician, could write lines like ‘the rustic threed/Begins ...”

“... in private quarrels was unseemly, or that stuffing chickens with water or sand to increase their weight and thus the profit margin did not befit a shopkeeper. No other Westerner approached the level of knowledge in Chinese culture, language and society attained by Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit, and the subject of an earlier book by Spence, who spent 27 ...”

“... punctual. This may be so. It is also possibly the case that Ian Botham plays cricket to keep his weight down and his wrists supple. But the ‘encourages good writing habits’ justification seems to me wholly incidental (and possibly outweighed by the bad scholarly habits which reviewing fosters, like making your mind up). An important reason why academics ...”

“... be something in philosophy that counts as ‘getting it right’. In this, it properly rejects Richard Rorty’s model for the future of philosophy (or rather, as he sees it, of what used to be philosophy), the model of a conversation. Unless a conversation is very relentless – for instance, one between philosophers – it will not be held together by ...”

“... were four distinct marks in the carpet, indentations where the chair that took their combined weight had stood. A detail noticed, with affectionate forensic eye, in the bedroom of the house in which Ronald Walter Kötting died in 2000. Father’s heart was bad, he spent time in hospital – and then, with no hope of recovery, he came home to wait. Andrew ...”

“... unconnected with what actually happened. Winter begins her book with the story of a young man, Richard Ivens, who in 1906, as a result of intense interrogation and possibly hypnosis, came to believe – that is, to remember – that he had murdered a woman whose body he had found, a crime he later denied but was executed for. His case was taken up by two ...”

“... into more than half its carrier’s offspring, will spread. These genes are not merely selfish in Richard Dawkins’s sense of being selected to out-compete different versions of themselves in the population: they are ruthless because, as in the case of Medea, they can spread even though their effects are strongly detrimental to the evolutionary interests of ...”

“... of a sensitive exit and a pretty corpse. Those who want a gust of emotion will usually go to a Richard Curtis film, or read one of Goodwin’s suggested poems for people feeling out-of-sorts. And if they rent Four Weddings and a Funeral they can have both at once, without having to leave their own heads, however briefly. ‘Accessibility’ is the ...”

“... In the international arena, Cuba was like a mighty ant, carrying several multiples of its weight in the fight against white supremacy. Across Africa, tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers helped to secure anti-colonial gains, most dramatically the defeat of the South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola, which jump-started the ...”