“... helpless child’, Gosse represented his father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, as a small-minded bigot. In Edmund’s case, the not uncommon inclination to see ourselves as pitiful victims when we remember our childhood was magnified by the wish to imply a heroic escape from the tyranny of an eminent Victorian. Even Edmund, however, was taken ...”

“... he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One claimed he ‘could not find whereof he [Tanner] could levye ...”

“... friends and colleagues of Professor Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in ...”

“... took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ‘seeks’ to keep it all ...”

“... constrained the behaviour of the Neo-Pagan women, as they did that of the still unmarried Virginia Stephen. She felt excluded by the sexual exploits of the homosexual men around her – pretty much all of them Apostles – even while she felt exhilarated by the lack of inhibition in their discussion of them. Despite their illegality, what she called ‘the ...”

“... a marker of a civilised polity – the former leader of the free world seems to have joined a small handful of unlikely companions (China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq among them) by enthusiastically re-embracing it. (The company is even more exclusive when it comes to the execution of juveniles: China gave it up in 1997 and over the last decade the United ...”

“... even when the state retained a controlling interest. But the gains from corporatisation were small compared to those created by new technology, healthier and better educated workers, and labour market reforms that increased incentives for further training. Workers who have an urban hukou (a residence permit giving them access to a city’s public ...”

“... death. While Urry has made no comparable discovery – perhaps no one will – he has lit up many small corners of Marlowe’s life, particularly of his childhood. Christopher Marlowe – or Marley, in the more common contemporary spelling, the one he used in his only extant signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He ...”

“... a title for one of the chapters, influencing its tone and content. They are Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stephen Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad – and H.P. Lovecraft. The last-named crops up almost as a joke when Smiricky’s girlfriend buys some farcical ‘sex-aids’ at a ‘Lovecraft’ shop: he tells her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the ...”

“... anything else, is A Woman’). There are also essays on Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, Traven’s The Death Ship, and of course Swift. It seems that no book concerned with the idea of the man of letters as man of action is nowadays complete without an essay or two on Swift: an honourable exemplar whose best older celebrants have been ...”

“... understand’. Set against this passage is a reproduction of Fernande’s souvenir pieux – ‘a small religious card that could be inserted between the pages of a missal’, a printed reminder of the deceased, with prayers and texts, which was sent to her Roman Catholic friends and kinsfolk, urging them to pray for her soul, her departed spirit. Such ...”

“... with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their descendants were ...”

“... and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of foundations ...”

“... sociologist thinks that tells us anything about mobility, though some economists do. Among them is Stephen Machin, whose Social Mobility and Its Enemies (co-authored with Lee Elliot Major) likens absolute social mobility to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but ...”

“... rejected by the modern synthesis. These quotations come from a recent paper in Palaeobiology by Stephen Jay Gould. What is the new theory? Is it indeed likely to replace the currently orthodox ‘neo-Darwinian’ view? Proponents of the new view make a minimum and a maximum claim. The minimum claim is an empirical one concerning the nature of the fossil ...”