“... but about Jarrell’s one cannot be so sure. Of this query he was himself acutely aware, and it may have contributed to his mysterious death – accident or suicide – struck by a car when walking on a main road. The tone and import of his letters are as bland as apple pie, and their reader has no sense of the tensions and traumas that led him to mental ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the prize (in his acceptance speech he credited the role Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation may have played in that result). These novels, really, are romances, in the sense that everything that happens in them is charged with magic, nothing is merely ordinary or redundant, everything finally connects together inside some larger esoteric scheme – even ...”

“... was spiked, and I don’t have it, or the book, or much memory of the book. Of course, this one may be spiked as well, but I’ve now read Like a Fading Shadow four times, and I can see it will be one of a handful of books I open and start reading – somewhere, anywhere – at least once a year for the rest of my life. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids ...”

“... institutions we now take for granted (from not walking on the grass to the two-part Tripos and May Balls) were invented by these grey, smug, ‘hen-pecked’ late 19th-century types, all tucked up in bed by 10 p.m. Nor is it much easier to explain why Period Piece scored the remarkable success that it did – and continues to do. It certainly trades on the ...”

“... Spraggs writes, ‘that it has even been suggested that the astute professional malefactor may well have regarded clerical status as a useful qualification. A cleric could not be executed, though he might be jailed.’ The Folvilles’ plea that they were trying to right wrongs that could not be rectified otherwise was the standard justification of the ...”

“... The main title of this collection may at first seem wantonly non-descriptive, but it turns out to be exact. The first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later. Clichés are infallible symptoms of used thinking ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... exploited by grizzled old men for their own purposes. Plausible evolutionary explanations for this may be offered in terms of the value of aggression in spreading one’s genes. Outsiders tend to think that a great many such explanations have at most a specious plausibility. Atran has a healthy scepticism, and speaks of just-so stories. An explanation is no ...”