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“... 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 ...”

“... came of age working on the newspapers that his father tried and failed to establish in a number of small towns. With only meagre formal schooling, he read widely on his own, taught himself Spanish and German, and began writing poems in the style of Heinrich Heine, a few of which were accepted by the Atlantic. In 1860, he was asked to write a campaign biography ...”

“... for execution. The statues are larger than life-size, with eerie, enlarged, polished onyx eyes and small teeth (real ones). You could walk among the statues, become part of the scene, one of the witnesses, one of the voyeurs, and share in the figures’ perplexity and awe. Pacheco also showed richly coloured, buffed and waxed oil paintings on mythical ...”

“... hears only words of the kind that embarrass Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, the kind that Stephen Dedalus fears in Ulysses. ‘So proud,’ men tell him. ‘So grateful, so honoured. Guardians. Freedoms. Fanatics. TerrRr.’ ‘The war,’ women say, ‘the troops because defending szszszsz among nations szszszsz owl-kay-duzz szszszsz.’ Sometimes ...”

“... of a dozen to do wrong what he does right – and a slew of British directing talent led by Stephen Daldry has brought it to the small screen. The British settings are spectacular, the whole thing like an implosion of David Kynaston, but the main achievement is Morgan’s, in finding ways to show the human side of ...”

“... In the last four years, Trump has fed his supporters a steady diet of racism and aggression. A small selection from this extensive menu would include his Birtherist questioning of Obama’s citizenship; his attack on the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action; his praise of those ‘very fine people’ among the Neo-Nazis who marched in ...”

“... and took it in turns to correct his spelling and syntax (both quite dreadful). Gibran produced a small body of writings in Arabic and in English, and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic ...”

“... of a number of the pieces of New Science which Regis describes. Take, for example, the work of Stephen Wolfram. An Etonian who published his first paper on particle physics at the age of 15 and got his PhD from Caltech at 20, Wolfram wanted (in Regis’s words) to explain, ‘not the complexity of any given phenomenon, but complexity itself, wherever it ...”