“... and the evolutionary biologists split into sociobiologists and the rest – separate species, we may suppose, since intercourse between the two has not so far proved fruitful. Stephen Gould’s contribution to this last debate is to open one or two coffins containing the scientific skeletons of the past with the purpose of nailing down the lids even more ...”

“... trilogy, some of them, like Apthorpe, pushed to the edge of caricature: but although the people may be comic, the war itself is a serious matter. There is something dotty about Ritchie-Hook, the defence of Crete is a shambles, but in the end Waugh’s work belongs within the realistic tradition of the English novel. So does Olivia Manning’s Balkan ...”

“... internal government airline, Aeropostal, was known to its riders as ‘Aeromortal’. It may even say nothing against the argument that in the later Seventies, more than twenty years after Hirschman had had the thought, it was still the case that there were more ‘black star’ airports, as the International Airline Pilots’ Association denotes ...”

“... to the observer’s eye the same proximal stimulus pattern as does the real scene.’ The picture may thus be construed as a section through the visual pyramid, and if, with Leonardo, we imagine this as a pane of glass, the artistic success consists in marking the glass’s surface in such a way that there is no perceptual difference to be registered between ...”

“... see Auld Reekie,’ Stevenson wrote to his fellow Scottish novelist S.R. Crockett from Samoa in May 1893, eighteen months before his death: ‘I shall never set my foot upon the heather. Here I am until I die and here will I be buried.’ But, as he told another correspondent, his head was ‘filled with the blessed, beastly place [i.e. Scotland] all the ...”

“... of South Africa, which seeks to anticipate almost every conceivable problem and circumstance that may arise in the future. What, exactly, constitutes the ‘equal protection of the law’ guaranteed to citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment? How far may Congress go to promote the ‘general welfare’? The Constitution’s ...”

“... trend – ‘re-enacting the hubris of the Romantics’ – by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese). It may well indeed be high time that classical scholarship, too, thought harder about the kinds of voice it chooses to hear (or to speak with). When Braund, for example, chooses to admit that she would rather read A.S. Byatt than the American Journal of ...”

“... with what was called the ‘emancipation of the flesh’ – even if his writings, like theirs, may make present-day readers wonder how ‘emancipatory’ this concern really was. Against the mechanistic science of the 18th century, and the arid rationalism he found in Descartes, Büchner, like Goethe, insists that nature is a living organism. He ...”

“... of the Caribbean as well as Latin America – the word for fig is used of the banana, so this may be another example of those inspired clerical slips which result in widespread conventions. That the figleaf is hard to fix to the body every child confronted with a Renaissance statue has noticed. Banana leaves, on the other hand, can be draped and threaded ...”

“... and doubts. So good are Jenny Uglow’s discussions of the Gaskell novels that the actual texts may not quite live up to them, although she conveys their virtues with a kind of discernment very much in tune with her subject’s own. As one would expect, Mrs Gaskell got steadily better as a writer as she went on, learning and perceiving more until the moment ...”

“... the town’s physical beauty ... As a nature lover, Kinsey must have admired the campus.’ This may be right. Or it may be wrong. Kinsey may have been blind to the regional differences, indifferent to the town’s look, disgusted by the campus, too busy to notice – ...”

“... durable, ‘a unity of inspiration that radiates into plot and personages alike’. His poetry may be ‘of the surface’, but its complex achievements make it far from superficial. After all, ‘poetry of the surface cannot be understood without study’ and the immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind. No calls of unconscious to unconscious, no ...”

“... he decided not on snow or lilies, but on ‘paper-white’. This association with cleanliness may help to explain why it was often invoked in medical recipes. One 15th-century charm to reduce fevers suggested writing nine apotropaic words on a piece of paper and eating a word each day (parchment wouldn’t have gone down so easily). More prosaically, it ...”

“... Senate lawn. The reporter asked whether this wasn’t beneath the aide’s dignity. ‘To you this may be a dog,’ the aide replied. ‘To me, it’s an ambassadorship.’Even when a nominee has bipartisan support, Senate confirmation takes a long time. Before being nominated, the appointee is investigated both by the administration’s political leaders and ...”

“... has for nearly three millennia been imposed from outside – is not as controversial as it may sound. Historians of the Levant and North Africa have chipped away at the notion that the label ‘Phoenician’ is useful for talking about the experiences, beliefs, networks or practices of such a heterogeneous group of ancient people.Quinn’s contribution ...”