“... Ray explained to his readers, comparison with the written entries will mean that ‘the bird may soon be found.’ Birkhead tells us that ‘subsequent authors revered Willughby and Ray’ for their system, and claims that it was in some ways superior to the one later devised by Linnaeus in the Systema Naturae. As a means of testing it, Birkhead takes ...”

“... remembered.’ Like being in love, yoga tends to produce banalities, however transformational it may seem to the person doing it. Carrère describes what it does to the body, the way concave stretches to convex, weight transfers from one leg to the other ‘as slowly as possible, like pouring honey’. He tries to remain detached when observing himself, his ...”

“... knees in prayer, attack the art or react sexually to it, however powerful our initial responses may be.The repression extends to what we allow ourselves to think about the history of images. Although museums now rarely describe non-Western art as ‘primitive’, it is still unusual to hear a European artwork’s original erotic, medical or miracle-working ...”

“... May and June are the worst months to visit Pakistan: temperatures in Lahore can go up to 120°F, and I still remember the melting tar on the road, which virtually doubled the time it took to bike home from school. I had been invited, however, to give the Eqbal Ahmed Memorial Lectures in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi ...”

“... to be an outsider, as not sharing a common identity. Thrown into the company of strangers we may turn inward, out of fear, or indifference, or the belief that only in that way shall we find our ‘true’ selves; or we may turn outward, anticipating interactions that offer neither a sense of wholeness nor comfort in ...”

“... argues, recognised as an offence justiciable in every country’s courts. International law may meanwhile have substituted sovereign immunity for divine right, but human rights law has since 1946 gradually broken through this shield, placing the worst crimes of rulers against their people within the reach of justice and beyond impunity. It ...”

“... to the police forensic laboratory. Few of the bombers are Iraqi (so they say), though the number may be increasing. But the organisation, the vehicles, the explosives, the detonators, the safe houses and the intelligence must all be home-grown. Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister, told me that the Iraqi army recently found a workshop capable of turning out ...”

“... this idea, preferring even now to think of Brodsky as not much better than a traitor. They may have disagreed with the crude way in which it was articulated, but they would have sided with the official view of his departure: good riddance to bad rubbish. From a more cynical perspective, the removal of a talent such as Brodsky’s made things easier for ...”

“... closing with Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘industry and empire’, is more rooted in older approaches than may appear at first sight. And some of the detail, too, is questionable. Free trade was a remarkably tenacious doctrine, lasting well beyond the 1880s (in fact, until 1932). Revenue derived from direct taxation did not begin to overtake that derived from indirect ...”

“... you happen to be subjecting the neighbours to home movies. The ashtrays are overflowing. There may be an alcoholic, active or reformed, lying on the living-room sofa. Is he thinking about the pint of whiskey he has hidden under the cushions; or has he just got home from an exhausting AA meeting? He has a job he does not like and is not getting on with his ...”

“... 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 ...”