“... oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small’. Like many of his scientific contemporaries (there were a dozen competing taxonomies in Blumenbach’s day, classifying humans into between two and seven types), he was also setting up a hierarchy. ‘The white colour holds the first place,’ he ...”

“... find it.” That is the most important truth that has ever been uttered,’ he said in his Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1933, published as The Name and Nature of Poetry. His poetry is always fascinated by what is irresolvable – ‘Keep we must, if keep we can/These foreign laws of God and man’ – and his scholarly prose concerned, above all, with such ...”

“... by a new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), with claimants divided into three groups: a small number ‘with the most severe health conditions or disabilities’ would receive the highest level of payment and wouldn’t be expected to look for work; those whose conditions were less severe would have to do ‘work-related activity’, practice ...”

“... English parcels varied, so merchants sprang up in the barrack-rooms to trade in commodities for a small cigarette percentage. Anyone wanting to exchange a meat loaf for a tin of Spam went to a merchant, and you went to them if you wanted to buy a Yorkshire pudding, for instance. Each merchant had a list of current prices attached to the barrack-room door ...”

“... such a transparent near-hoax, but that, they should have bothered with international law at all. Stephen Greenblatt, in Marvellous Possessions, makes a similar suggestion about Columbus’s remark that he was not contradicted – ‘y no me fué contradicho’ – when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish king. How ...”

“... and a brilliantly inventive and headlong sequence, propelled by Michel Legrand’s sparkling small-combo jazz score, that takes the action to Paris, where, coincidentally, fashion magnates and tastemakers from around the world have convened for the generic prêt-à-porter collections. Sergei meets a fashion magnate at the airport and shares a cab with ...”

“... few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor naturally regrets this limitation. One can believe him when he says that all ...”

“... Dawkins on one side and Eldredge on the other. Eldredge is associated in this controversy with Stephen Jay Gould, his long-term research collaborator.* The disagreement, and the heat that it generates, are difficult for an outsider to understand, but they appear to have something to do with the way in which evolutionary theory is to be presented to a ...”

“... marvellously encapsulates the Jacobson journey through time – which begins tenderly with a small boy being handed through a train window from mother to father, and ends with the author in hospital, seeing not himself in the mirror but his father. Time, and time again, has passed. And yet more time. At one point he gently shows himself as a ...”

“... at the centre of a now visible two-class society – Britain in the 1980s. As we sit idly by, a small élite of quite extraordinary wealth rediscovers opera. ‘The middling sort’ of citizenry may, of course, find their way into the upper circle. But the language of opera, rendered histrionically, invades other places, and the culture of opera can quite ...”

“... this shows that decriminalisation will not transform the social scene more than would admitting a small percentage of immigrants, though in each case a subculture will emerge, or emerge more strongly than before. One possible objection to the libertarian argument for repeal therefore falls away. Nor are unenforced laws a matter of indifference, since they can ...”

“... aware of the problems but optimistic that they could be overcome,’ he said in an interview with Stephen Colbert. ‘The book is the story, perhaps, of how I was wrong about that … I couldn’t believe it was that bad … I thought it was possible to work with somebody. I thought surely they would want to learn about the complexity of arms control ...”

“... Ossenhooft (the Ox Head).In the Middle Ages, Antwerp had been a quiet regional town, with a small river port and two trade fairs a year. The butchers’ trade was heavily protected and they easily met the demands of the city’s population. But when the Zwin channel silted up around 1500 and Bruges became inaccessible by ship, trade moved east to ...”

“... and, in some ways, disappeared. Like Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America by Stephen Prothero (2001), Committed to the Cleansing Flame is a comprehensively researched, thoroughly annotated, impressively appendixed and richly illustrated text. Both books make a titular nod to the central and requisite shift that made the burning of dead ...”

“... smaller details of everyday life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception-room, tragedies of an afternoon call, crises involving cups of tea’. Naturalism, by contrast, emerges when ‘things commence to happen to us, if we kill a man or two, or get mixed up in a tragic ...”