“... vine species which were resistant to the disease. The choice was by no means automatic. Hybrids may raise eyebrows in France today – the only hybrid permitted for the production of appellation contrôlée wines is Baco 22A in Armagnac and its use is being phased out – but they had many advocates in the immediate post-phylloxera world. Grape-growers were ...”

“... novel, being shorter, darker and less furiously though still adequately inventive. Its economy may shock some folk, for Peter Carey is known to be an exuberant novelist, copious, various and fantastic. It is possible to admire his books for their lack of respect for boundaries, for the qualities they share with the work of modern Latin American ...”

“... in the 1850s, of a ‘milieu intérieur’: ‘All of the vital mechanisms, however varied they may be, have always one goal, to maintain the uniformity of the conditions of life in the internal environment . . . The stability of the internal environment is the condition for the free and independent life.’Our bodies can only maintain homeostasis within ...”

“... his speech outside Number Ten on 7 July, his sole political resignation had been from Theresa May’s cabinet in 2018, the opening gambit in his successful campaign to take her job. In 2004, when his lies about his affair with Petronella Wyatt and her subsequent abortion were exposed, he refused Michael Howard’s order that he resign as a shadow ...”

“... illegal (he was found to have suppressed expert reports that showed his plans were unviable). He may have thought that the removal of Kenneth Clarke, Dominic Grieve and (perhaps) William Hague from the cabinet left the field clear for his long promised assault on human rights law. Instead, he lost any respectable cover for the Conservative Party’s sinister ...”

“... the objectives of the treaties all member states have signed and the latter provides that the EU may act only if an individual member state cannot otherwise achieve what it wants in areas outside the EU’s exclusive competence. The UK has a record of ‘gold plating’ EU legislation, by far exceeding its requirements, in areas as diverse as animal ...”

“... and France – to organise a swift transition and abstain from seeking power himself. But in May 2021 he carried out a coup within the coup, removing the transitional government and taking charge of the administration, flanked by the populist politician Choguel Maïga. Between them they formulated the plan for Mali’s long ‘transition’, which ...”

“... based on accumulated data that give probabilistic predictions of the correct molecular structure, may exist now, but they didn’t in 1951. The fundamental problem is that, unlike rays of light, X-rays cannot be focused to produce an image, or reflected to produce a mirror image. Yet use them we must, if we want to get down to the architecture of these ...”

“... will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution. Once the ‘Arabs’ in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as ‘Muslims’ it was easy to elicit support for Israel’s demographic ...”

“... from Richard Shilleto, a Cambridge don, a riposte entitled simply Thucydides or Grote? That may be a more complex question than Shilleto realised. Thucydides argued that the Athenian Empire was hated by its subject peoples; admirers of Athenian democracy are naturally eager to confute that judgment. Moreover, though Thucydides has a fair claim to be ...”

“... lies wincing upstairs and Kate grits her teeth against the pain of breast-feeding. The war zone may be only a suburban American house, but the family is stuck ‘in the trenches’, focused on surviving each new crisis yet ‘always losing ground’. Kate – the former globetrotter – grapples with nipple guards as her partner retreats to the status of ...”

“... a hearty, back-slapping, unquenchably loquacious Army type, though there is just a hint that he may be homosexual. As a boy, the narrator hero-worships him, and when they meet again years later Medlicott insists on treating him as an old friend, dining him at expensive restaurants or taking him on exhausting pub crawls. The narrator cannot make up his mind ...”

“... another account – of the Darwin-Wallace story. But Wallace is not now the forgotten figure he may once have been. He was a much more immediate writer than Darwin and his seminal contributions to animal distribution studies are acknowledged by most academics. More important, after his barnacle studies, Darwin was no longer really a ‘species man’. He ...”

“... for his control of tone and genre. Open his trilogy, His Dark Materials, almost anywhere and you may find bears boasting their readiness for ritual combat in language vaguely reminiscent of Beowulf, and onlookers who enjoy the company and protection of friendly daemons, all of it plausible and smooth. But this new book has nothing to do with that sort of ...”

“... to turn peasants against landowners, the nobility and state officials in the name of socialism. He may also have belonged to an even more secretive group called Hell, which wanted to kill the tsar in order to provoke a general uprising that would lead, it was hoped, to the establishment of a socialist government. Karakozov was tried and executed in September ...”