“... per cent of the last vote for the governor’s office, an effort that initially floundered. But in May 2003, Congressman Darrell Issa of San Diego started his own recall effort, with a view to becoming governor himself, bankrolling the petition drive with $1.3 million of his own money, or at least what he claimed was his own money. What had begun as a quixotic ...”

“... governments: so far even the rich haven’t been able to buy their way out of a traffic jam. This may change – we might yet see bus lanes redesignated as toll lanes. The contributors to Autopia grapple with these problems, but for the most part not very energetically. Allen Samuels tells us that the car ‘like all epochal icons . . . does not mean one ...”

“... to be driven extinct themselves; and in time, populations with more good guys among their members may outcompete the populations with fewer – a possibility explicitly envisaged by Darwin in The Descent of Man. But how (on earth) did this come about at all? Hamilton, in his seminal paper of 1975 on the ‘innate social aptitudes of man’, pointed out that ...”

“... nothing to lose are as dangerous in their own way as those who lord it over them. It is this devil-may-care attitude we relish in Falstaff and Toby Belch, whose roguery is spiced by the fact that they are knights of the realm. They can knock around with the lower orders because hierarchy means nothing to those at the apex of it. It is the lower-middle-class ...”

“... the lack of a head: the estimate is now generally revised down. Readers of the LRB of 22 July 2010 may remember the arthritic 70-year-old said to be the occupant of the Gokstad ship, later revealed as an almost freakishly robust man in his prime, with several fatal battle wounds. So it isn’t unlikely they got Matilda wrong too. The other allegation would be ...”

“... only apparent. Doing nothing – the lifelong ambition of Beckett’s characters, for example – may well be better than doing something, and is often philosophically more interesting. But being nobody cannot be a consummation to be wished. And before the bite there is a fine comic pathos in the sight of this invisible and unretainable man, a picture of a ...”

“... The clinical language used to describe the loss of pulse when the heart fails is not subtle. There may be ‘rapid haemodynamic deterioration’: the blood stops moving around the body. Presentation is with ‘dyspnoea, syncope or pain in the praecordium’ (the patient gasps for breath and collapses, feeling as if their chest is being torn apart). Many people ...”

“... we can imagine them holding their conversational own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they ...”

“... see, what we have to deduce: Every landscape offers, at first glance, an immense disorder which may be sorted out howsoever we please. We may sketch out the history of its cultivation, plot the accidents of geography which have befallen it, and ponder the ups and downs of history and prehistory: but the most august of ...”

“... evolution but also has, as Nagel says, an ‘idealist’ character. Teleological principles may have moved the universe towards some kind of goal or fulfilment, and a glimmer of mentality may permeate even basic physical processes. For Nagel it is true in a more global way, a wholesale way, that ‘each of our lives ...”

“... argue that good novels depend on being able to dramatise what people don’t know: the author may know things, and so may the reader, but people not knowing things is always more interesting than what they know. In a good novel facts will seem incidental. Tolstoy gives us a picture of life on the Napoleonic battlefield ...”

“... which they also fiercely defy, and they look back so insistently to her earlier work that they may not seem designed to stand up on their own. How did Rich get to this point? She was a Radcliffe undergraduate when Auden picked A Change of World for the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1951; that book and The Diamond Cutters (1955) demonstrate an elegant if all ...”

“... of the behavioural constraints imposed upon us whenever we leave the privacy of our homes – we may come to expect that certain places and occasions will require scrupulous truth-telling.’ It’s endearing that he takes this fantasy – in which a bright line separates truth from lies and a remote brainscan can isolate and evaluate precise propositions ...”

“... documents are torn, pitted and worm-eaten. Abruptly, right in the middle of a word, the text may just break off. Modern science offers some help: the binocular microscope, infrared light, the digital scanner and multispectral imaging have all been used to sharpen abraded or worn ink. Even so, making sense of the straggling columns of blotched and broken ...”

“... first conferred on her by a mad millenarian back in England in 1795 (when she was 19), and which may have fed into her messianic fantasies later on. In her defence, it is worth pointing out that she wasn’t blind – or not all the time – to the fact that these might be delusory. But, as she wrote to Meryon in 1818, ‘Here without any stir on my own ...”