“... it is generated. The Divine Comedy is a great example of this kind of total adequacy, but a haiku may also constitute a satisfactory comeback by the mind to the facts of the matter. As long as the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighing function. It becomes ...”

“... upwards, downwards and outwards from unitary national authorities. The core of these questions may be summarised as follows. Is ‘sovereignty’ a starkly juridical concept with the same timeless properties in all conceivable political regimes, or is it a contingent entity deeply enmeshed in the historical process? Is sovereignty located in a ...”

“... that the vast majority of biologists will not recognise the subject as they practise it. Some may want to add a question mark to his title. Before reviewing the parts of biology he loves, Mayr interposes some philosophical chapters, designed both to bring out the importance of biological examples for understanding science and to defend the ideas of reason ...”

“... Vehicle One, or the ‘electric turkey’ as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in ...”

“... intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to poetry, the representative and the didactic are hard to tell apart. These two anthologies, eclectic, open-minded books, covering the same period if not always the same ground, appeared from big publishers within a month of each other. Each ...”

“... But the photographs in Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks show him always sitting by the camera. He may not have looked through the viewfinder but he identified with the camera: the eye that knew exactly what it would find, the gaze for whose benefit everything would perform according to plan. We see him sitting by the camera on the set of Rear Window, looking ...”

“... natural order rather than a debatable preference, he skips away from honest debate. Of course, he may be right. His opponents may be the unwitting occupants of Trotsky’s dustbin, wasting their lives on dreams as impossible as restoring the Bourbons. The seriousness with which he deserves to be treated ...”

“... Pau, in the South-West of France; her father was Spanish. She knew the Basque Country well, and it may have been her influence that prompted Steer’s next move. He arrived at the Franco-Spanish border in August 1936, in time to report the first action of the Basque campaign in the Civil War. Margarita died in childbirth the following year; Steer buried her in ...”

“... after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic. And of course he wrote a diary, nine large volumes of it, which he began on 1 January 1660 and ...”

“... recognise ‘three classes of crime’ and ‘three kinds of societies’. The rhetoric of love may also be said to be of three kinds. Less schematic but not a bit less serious are disquisitions on such subjects as the Comic, which includes the observation that masters have essence but servants only existence – it’s a pity servants are going out of ...”

“... in need of the other for finance and security. From a metropolitan point of view, the Civil War may be simplistically explained as the moment when these tectonic plates first met and ground together. The City of London, then as now inward-looking except when under any threat to its existence, had no wish to expand its walls or boundaries – a peculiarity ...”

“... Early in May, on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, Colin Powell met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small group of civil society activists, including Hanan Ashrawi and Mostapha Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise and mild consternation at the computerised maps of the settlements, the eight-metre-high wall, and the dozens of Israeli Army checkpoints that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians ...”

“... something else again’ in the course of his alphabet-surfing. The fairy realm of the féth fíada may not only be contiguous to ours but ‘contaygious’ too (the book’s fourth section takes its title from a ballad beginning ‘In Egypt’s land, contaygious to the Nile’). Where Auden has given us the Lords of Limit, Muldoon gives us Lords of ...”

“... on parental feeding right into their late teens, even in hunter-gatherer societies. Orangutans may stretch to an eight-year birth interval, but if humans waited till the older child was nutritionally independent, we would need a 15-year interval. There had to be a whole new factor in human upbringing, if the species was to survive at all. The new factor ...”

“... questions about the Rights of Man unimaginable to Jefferson or the Jacobins. Under what conditions may human body parts be commodified – seemingly mundane bits like skin, blood and corneas as well as fancier ones like eggs, sperm, fetal tissue, kidneys and, crucially, genes and personal genetic information? What place in our social classifications is to be ...”