“... 1980, the European Parliament returned to the attack. By a shrewd procedural device, it voted only small changes in the 1981 budget – but a huge supplementary budget for 1980, enabling the Community to spend on regional and employment aid in 1981 most of what the Governments had previously refused. Taken aback, the Governments couldn’t muster a big enough ...”

“... well before the deadline, and often in person. A new editorial assistant, handed copy by the small seventy-five-year-old in a deerstalker who had scaled the steep stairs to our earlier offices, decided he must be a Mercury messenger. In these Diaries Taylor wrote about the early days of CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude ...”

“... we learn that his beloved ‘blues’ are not glorious, fugitive slices of heaven, but a small-winged, drab, obscurely differentiated tribe which includes a great number of widely-distributed species. So why choose them? Presumably because he was serious, in love with difficult identifications – and because this rapidly differentiating family held ...”

“... that the Red Sox lost game seven as well. Bill Buckner moved to Idaho. Oh, the curse! Yet, as Stephen Jay Gould points out in an essay in this posthumous collection of his baseball writings, it was not Buckner’s fault that the Red Sox lost the Series. When Buckner made his mistake, Boston had already blown their lead (on a wild pitch, though almost no ...”

“... survive because, despite its merits, it ‘mimes transgression but never crosses the boundary’. Stephen Haggard’s Nya is the story of the love between a young man and a 13-year-old girl. Readers of Lolita will imagine such a book as a hotbed of sexual and linguistic transgression. But in Nya nothing untoward happens. Sexual innocence is not even tempted ...”

“... out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying.’ Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith’s friends, eulogised the effects of an invigorating tramp in the country in the true spirit: ‘You can consume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe, and feel more virtuous, and thoroughly at peace with the universe, than it is easy ...”

“... It is still often proposed that religion and science need not conflict. Stephen Jay Gould held that they occupy ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: science deals with questions of fact, religion with questions of value and meaning. This is wishful thinking, because religions base themselves on factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead ...”

“... was not yet all writer, and in this year we find him speculating in South African gold and sailing small boats, ‘with the wind’s melancholy song in the rigging rising above the accompaniment of the immense and monotonous voice of huge billows ceaselessly breaking in an infinity of grey skies, green water and dazzling foam’. He was 38 and clearly needed ...”

“... have attracted accomplished disciples. One of the best books on Barthes is by the Englishman Stephen Heath, written in French, and Barthesian French at that. No small feat. But all such endeavours have an unavoidable air of trotting obediently along paths that have been opened up by others. A further difficulty is that ...”

“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”

“... a solitary explorer, writing in 1918 for a war-weary public that could tolerate Victoriana only in small, savoury doses. He could not foresee the Victorian Revival: the huge appetite that would send a navy of researchers across the ocean of evidence, lowering buckets, trawling nets, and bringing to light more and more remains of that vanished civilisation. By ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”

“... which. Sometimes the human shapes have virtually disappeared under the paint or, as in Mr and Mrs Stephen Buckley, are converted into geometric forms; which doesn’t prevent the artist from saying: ‘the subject of the painting is simply a family group sitting round the fire in the evening.’ Other titles seem to promise that the picture will tell a ...”

“... dusted with scales as dense as the down on a chick. Oddest of the oddities was Hallucigenia, a small, spindly, spiky thing, yet with tubular organs, and what may or may not have been a head. The Cambrian ocean swarmed with sea-going arthropods: jointed-legged animals, now familiar as lobsters and lice, beetles and bees, spiders and scorpions. Their ...”

“... brings us back to Derry, perhaps to a particular family. The moral for her is ‘that people in small places make big mistakes. Not bigger than the mistakes of other people. But that there is less room for big mistakes in small places.’ Bad history, big mistakes. But what is the father’s mistake? That he thinks he is ...”