“... of such a meta-principle of scientific reasoning as the conservation of energy. And the same may be said of natural selection. The degree of abstraction in the formulation of highly theoretical constructs makes any parallel with buried treasure inappropriate. Even where we habitually speak, for example, of the ‘discovery’ of oxygen, there are ...”

“... work its real immediacy and appeal is that, regardless of the particular subject about which he may be writing, the present and the past have always come together in his work in such a way that he has been above all else a contemporary historian. To some extent, this is because the Victorian period, which is at the centre of his historical universe, remains ...”

“... that the ‘argument’ has two sides, and exactly two. If you are not for us – whoever ‘we’ may be – you are against us. If you are not ‘pro-nuclear’ you are ‘anti-nuclear’. A corollary of this attitude is the assumption that the two sides of the story are mutually exclusive: one side will tell you the good news, and the other the bad. For the ...”

“... understand that they have much to gain from working with liberals, and that democratic governance may provide the ummah, and the faith itself, with better protection than a rigid Islamic state such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. Bayat describes the loose coalition of liberal and Islamist democrats as ‘post-Islamist’, in that they seek to establish ‘a pious ...”

“... Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the imagination struggles. The best it can do is a jam jar with a newt inside: the boy is ...”

“... says she will marry nobody but him, not even Jupiter. Catullus then says that lovers’ oaths may as well be on ‘rapida aqua’, ‘swift water’. Carson’s ‘river’ therefore flows speedily down the page, to the sea, in the shape of an L for ‘liar’, or for the turns lovers’ dialogues take. Carson’s writings show a brusque yet intimate ...”

“... measure. The city empties and no one leaves home. It does it during festive days, when the streets may be crowded, but both work and traffic slow down or stop. It happens during the monsoons, when the antique sewers can’t cope, and the roads are waterlogged, trousers rolled up, sandals lost. On these days feelings of withdrawal, celebration and ...”

“... to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed … I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly ...”

“... the usual limit of propriety. Then they become a bit more common (in the sense of frequent; they may also come to be regarded as less ‘common’ in the social sense). They do so because they can perform so many social and grammatical functions. They can fill in pauses, establish gender identities, build a group, or serve as all-purpose markers of ...”

“... Nazianzen’s ‘Soul and Body’, she has the rhetorician pray for the right words, ones that ‘may flourish/Of which mine enemy would spoil me,/Using pleasurehood to foil me!’ But the poem’s own fondness for verbal flourishes isn’t easily disentangled from pleasurehood. Her writing often uses pleasure as a foil; more often, though, it wants to be ...”

“... When the chills and fever subside, they leave behind an enveloping fatigue. But the relief may not last long. The symptoms can cycle back again, sometimes returning like clockwork every day, and sometimes every second or third day. If you’re unfortunate, there are also headaches and muscle aches; vomiting and diarrhoea; weight loss; jaundice ...”

“... has suddenly given way to the mechanical.The burner, with its central circle of reflective metal, may be taken as a metaphor for the camera with its central lens; and, like the burner it ends up facing, the camera is an inanimate machine yet an instrument of animation, utterly lifeless yet impinging on the stuff of life. Kiarostami’s most frequent metaphor ...”

“... wanted some say in how the country’s natural resources were exploited, and by whom. Pablo Neruda may have been a dank Stalinist in his politics, and have allowed this to infect his poetry, but he was writing as a patriot when he composed the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert Bly):But we have to ...”

“... two terms in residence). I never saw him perform as an actor, earliest of his incarnations, but we may have run across each other in pre-war days, when (as he records in Who’s Who) he was working as office-boy, like myself, in a publishing firm. In the war he had been with the Coldstream (adjutant to a Guards battalion can have been no rest-cure, though ...”

“... mistakenness or even duplicity? At any rate, when the outside doesn’t match the inside, things may be going, or have gone, awry. That boundary is not so simple.It’s possible I am overthinking this imaginary moment of early scripture. But it fascinates me that introducing a dialectic of inside and outside polarises the attributes of each and ...”