“... blob. The strangest parts are the seven tentacles arranged in a row down the back, each of which may have had its own mouth. Hallucigenia is so strange that it may not have been an animal at all. Gould suggests that it may have been a broken-off limb from a larger animal: this would ...”

“... when it has a mind to be, and in 1984 had more than ten years to put together such a grouping. It may be too late, or close to too late, now. The policy may or may not have been a feasible one. What impressed me, and startled Westminster friends much more versed in politics than I ...”

“... is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a hyper-articulate, decorous Queen’s English that deliberately celebrates the sort of cultures where dialect is ...”

“... We may nowadays he chary about using the word ‘genius’, but we still have a good idea what is meant by it. For example, there are great numbers of very gifted musicians who are admired but not called geniuses. But there are others manifestly prodigious, performing, often at extraordinarily early ages, a variety of feats so complex that the musical layman could hardly imagine, even with the most desperate labour, accomplishing any one of them, while even musicians are astonished: and we then reach for the good, handy, vague Enlightenment word and call them geniuses ...”

“... what can be achieved, by treatment of the sick. We begin to suspect that some disease problems may prove to be, as J.B.S. Haldane said of the universe, ‘not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose’. These issues have attracted the attention of many critics of medicine – a term applied indiscriminately to all who question the ...”

“... those of Dutch 17th-century genre painting and of French 18th-century painting in general – may come as something of a shock to those members of the public who do not keep their ears uncomfortably close to the ground. There have been hints, of course – but Philip Conisbee’s book is in fact the first to bring to a wide public the new interpretation ...”

“... confronted the Paisley phenomenon have not been entirely immune. More ‘scientific’ terminology may be applied – ‘authoritarian’, ‘fascistoid’, ‘reactionary’, ‘populist’ – but the gain in objective understanding is often more apparent than real. A shortage of hard research data from the grass roots of Protestant Loyalism has led ...”

“... of language than what Saussure called ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’.The trouble is that this may be not completely true. Some words do seem to resemble the thing they describe. Onomatopoeic words, like ‘boom’, ‘click’ or ‘ping’, are the clearest and most familiar case. Linguists call these ‘iconic’ or ‘sound-symbolic’ words: they seem ...”

“... by the ‘new journalism’, one of whose tactics was to magnify editorial personalities. It may be surmised that this owed something to the Victorian theatre cult of the star actor-manager, or the pulpit cult of the star preacher like Spurgeon. Hardie’s insistence on his own policies and methods led to unseemly squabbles with the paper’s ...”

“... as The Wrong Set, and in two succeeding collections, some affinity with the Compton-Burnett world may be detected. Blood relations are pestiferous tyrants as in ‘Mother’s Sense of Fun’, or perform in an insidiously disruptive role as in ‘Sister Superior’. It is when Angus Wilson turns novelist, however, that families begin regularly to face ...”

“... no children behind him, long before Behn had her first play produced.) Before 1666, Johnson/Behn may have visited the English colony at Surinam, the setting for Oroonoko, where she may have gathered political intelligence for Charles II’s government. During 1666 she certainly undertook such a mission to Antwerp, where ...”

“... Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. The scene is laid in darkness outside Madrid, where the city’s captured defenders face a firing-squad. Some already lie dead, boltered with pink gore; meanwhile, the squad ‘a faceless testudo’ takes aim again. The eye is drawn to a man, arms raised, pleading for his life. A point of suspension between life and death, he effectively sabotages the representation ...”

“... in The Selfish Gene, has recently gained entry into the OED as ‘an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation’. But the idea that culture is transmitted by imitation and learning in a manner analogous but not reducible to natural selection has been around for a long time, and many other terms have ...”

“... research grants and capital funding and can affect share prices. An adequately supported project may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of ...”

“... ashamed of itself . . . If this is the future of Brit Lit, gawd help us all.’ Be that as it may, Pelevin should anyway be looking over his other shoulder, as the comic-strip Anna Karenina blasts its way into the 21st century, to a generally horrified reception. Ilya Tolstoy, the novelist’s great-great-grandson, has said he can’t believe it’s a ...”