“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... congruent, whether you draw them from Clark Clifford’s memoirs, Seymour Hersh’s critique, Stephen Ambrose’s judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Interpretation of Literature’. This belittling tag, coined in a 1988 essay of the same name by Stephen Parrish, general editor of the monumental Cornell Wordsworth, reflected two more widespread beliefs in literary theory: that ‘language is prior to thought’ and that authorial intention is ‘not only elusive and illusory, but irrelevant’. In the ...”

“... Juliet Barker finds the idea ‘ludicrous’, but says no more. Wordsworth éminence grise Stephen Gill thought that a verdict on Johnston’s claims would only be possible after ‘years’ of ‘rigorous scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr ...”

“... banking steeply to avoid the pyramidal summit of the Canary Wharf tower, is named in honour of Sir Stephen Redgrave. After hacking through brambles, picking a path around Magellan Boulevard, Atlantis Avenue and a boarded-up missionary hut, I found myself outside the perimeter fence of the steel-grey block of Buhler Sortex Ltd. Two men wearing crisp blue shirts ...”

“... understand – a low wall made of dressed stone, large thin flat slabs, no mortar, but packed with small stones to bind them. Then the remains of a lower wall running up against it, making the corner of a rectangle. I pull away moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it. I want it to be a fort or an ancient lookout, in ...”

“... a Young Man, he asked Katherine Mullin, a senior lecturer at Leeds University, the extent to which Stephen Dedalus’s character was based on Joyce himself. ‘That,’ Mullin reasonably replied, ‘is an extremely complex question.’ ‘Well,’ Bragg snapped back, ‘I want an extremely simple answer to it so that we can move on.’ Truly, he is the ...”

“... positives for how much safety? In the canon of Western jurisprudence, it usually takes only a small number of false positives to call the legitimacy of the whole system into question. It is ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice ...”