“... one-to-one mapping of a square onto itself) discussed by mathematicians such as Stephen Smale and applies the model to historical time as the starting point for a series of reflections on the idea of progress, the invention of tradition and the importance of anachronism. But it was during the 1970s that science and technology marked ...”

“... than 70 per cent of the vote were Labour. The only one to win more than forty thousand votes was Stephen Timms (East Ham), who also had the third largest majority. In the early 1950s Labour had huge and useless majorities in the mining seats; now these majorities are in the cities. The problem is its results outside urban areas: Labour made no serious ...”

“... Geoffroy’s enthusiasm for transformationism – as evolution was known in those days – was, in Stephen Jay Gould’s accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound ...”

“... The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated joys. Lehmann, who published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to sensational acclaim in 1927, smoked, danced and divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a ...”

“... often try to harmonise the two by declaring that they are mutually exclusive domains, or, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould proposes that science limit itself to studying and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing ...”

“... Marryat, were the illegitimate daughters of white men. They never married, allowing them to act as small businesswomen particularly in urban areas. White men were their route to a freedom which brought with it the possibility of enslaving others. The​ families Livesay has tracked tend to be those in which fathers felt some affection and concern, albeit with ...”

“... cream-coloured coursers thought fit to enter Egdon no more.’ The cream-coloured courser is a small and beautiful plover, just over ten inches tall. The colour of its plumage is a complicated mixture of whites, buffs, greys and browns that shade smoothly into each other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws ...”

“... infrastructure projects: the building of the Forth rail bridge, or the construction by Leslie Stephen (himself a contributor to the OED) of his monumental Dictionary of National Biography.Ogilvie points out that for many years the OED wasn’t as stable or institutionally protected as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that their ...”

“... his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas Mayor. In 1981 Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the whole text, making ‘extensive alterations’ but hoping to ‘have preserved the undoubted felicity’ of much of the work. The new wordings were a matter partly of ...”

“... like the human body:… Even now the world’s great age is brokenAnd earth worn out scarce bears small animals,…We wear out oxen, wear out the strength of farmers,Wear down the ploughshare in fields that can scarce feed us,So do they now grudge their fruits and multiply our toil.As Star observes, Lucretius reconfigures Hesiod’s narrative of human ...”

“... nomination for president in 1960 carried this implication.) The myth of a West dominated by small family farms (Jefferson’s vision of the future) had already given way to the idea that the region was home to what Slotkin calls ‘bonanza capitalism’, the possibility of instant riches derived from successive gold rushes, a burgeoning oil industry and ...”

“... itself) and with the identity of form and meaning. Merely – though of course it was not a small ‘merely’ – he argued against the hermetic tendencies of Symboliste aesthetics. He praised Yeats for insisting that poetry was made for ordinary human beings and for ignoring the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the ...”

“... squandered and their admission to heaven put at risk. Pain relief might be administered in small doses, except to those such as lapsed Catholics – the fear being that even small doses might prevent them from returning to the religion of their baptism. In the same volume Eugene Tesson, a Jesuit, sanctioned ...”

“... as abundant as static on a broken TV. At 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, I honked the horn in front of a small adobe where Michael had spent the night with some friends. It was a clear sound in the dry desert air. Michael had left Marfa for Canada but flew back for the drive. On the phone we’d planned the trip as follows: always take back roads, eat only in ...”

“... may be comical, too, since the chain of logic, inevitably, is made up of both large beads and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it. Much of this appearance of logic is due to the ...”