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“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”

“... In a preliminary chapter called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ David Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a Matisse. He at once began to paint in oils, but soon discovered that he lacked talent and began to write about art instead, devoting himself thenceforth to the black and white of the page ...”

“... stasis, scattering, reconstruction – is typical of many libraries from the 17th century. David Pearson’s Book Ownership in Stuart England gives us a superlative tour of just about everything we might want to know about the early modern culture of book buying, borrowing, listing, shelving, storing and displaying. The ‘backbone’ of his ...”

“... plays which ignore the Classical unities – except in the provinces, where ‘Romantic’ simply means ‘absurd’. But then they discover that there are also Romantic novels, poems, epics and even single lines of verse. In 1827, Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell reveals Romanticism to be a combination of tragedy and comedy. But it also seems to mean the ...”

“... In his trawl of anthropological data, historical records, literature and letters, art and music, David Gilmore finds that men have always and everywhere expressed fear, disgust and hatred of women. From the peaceful and gentle !Kung San Bushmen to the urbane and civilised Montaigne, from folk legend to Freudian complex, from Medusa to the Blue Angel, men ...”

“... English was that so much of their history ‘happened overseas … that they don’t know what it means’. As this suggests, one reason Seeley remains worth reading (and if a modern, scholarly edition of his classic isn’t in production, it should be) is that in these islands the narrow vision he castigated has proved to be an enduring one. ‘British ...”

“... The important thing was to be out. I have firmly resolved never to enter a hospital again. If this means the end of my life I shall not care. Anything is better than to be imprisoned in a hospital. Life has begun to stir since I was released. I opened an exhibition of the works of David Low, which had been locked up since ...”

“... cryptic definition is not made clearer by a further reference to ‘proximate causes’. If this means anything, it seems to imply that functional or evolutionary explanations are ‘final causes’, but he does not actually say so, perhaps wisely. In practice, ethologists can be readily defined by the fact that they prefer to study animals in their natural ...”

“... and monogamy’. Strange they haven’t found the gene for smugness yet. Not to be outdone is David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose new book, The Dangerous Passion, is about jealousy, and why it’s ‘as necessary as love or sex’. His acknowledgments ...”

“... the old Clausewitzian maxim: he genuinely believes that politics is a continuation of war by other means. It was thought that if Karzai could be painlessly removed and replaced with his former colleague Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik from the north, it might create the impression that an unbearably corrupt regime had been peacefully removed, which would help the ...”

“... is the extension of political opinion – in every sense the prevailing opinion – by other means. One of the problems with intervening has, all along, been the ‘humanitarian’ tag, a fuzzy term that glossed over radical differences of opinion, not only between the warriors of Yugoslavia and politicians in the West, but between the Western media and ...”

“... attack in the US’, Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers has said, ‘their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programmes involved in biodefence research.’ Background checks are carried out on would-be researchers, obviously, but according to Ebright, ‘Mohammed ...”

“... Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such ...”

“... to force people to recognise it. By ‘conception of the good’, it is worth remarking, Ackerman means primarily the sense people have of the overall purpose or purposes of their lives in accordance with which they make potentially competitive claims for the allocation of scarce resources. Such a sense may be generalisable – other people ought perhaps to ...”

“... of social reformism. Colonel Akroyd, the woollen manufacturer, saw his housing scheme as a means of promoting home-ownership among the working class (the Halifax Permanent Building Society, founded in 1852, was involved in the venture), but he was also attached to the idea of the old English village, with a contented working population subservient to ...”