“... 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 ...”

“... maverick, self-regarding tendencies of architects with every bone in his body. Yet he was by no means unwilling to see promise when he met it, even in unlikely quarters. He admired architects working in a contemporary vernacular, such as the Norfolk practice, Tayler and Green, whose council estates and old people’s bungalows were built of brick and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... enclosed, distinctive world of their own. There are very few good British novels about sport, and, David Peace aside, hardly any about football – despite its place in our culture. In A Natural, Raisin delves into the life of a lower league English football team – a subject never covered before, as far as I know, in literary fiction. Perhaps it doesn’t ...”

“... of his origins is an American stereotype. But Woodward is not American, and we know that he means no irony from the way he commends others among his colleagues: Captain Paul Hoddinott of HMS Glasgow was ‘a real sea-dog, going back generations, and he believes some branches of the family served in the Spanish Main ... His father was an engineering ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... three-year-old. Their mother pretends she is still living in NYC, a trick maintained by means of carefully scheduled Instagram posts, and is trying to come to terms with what it means to have failed to afford New York. She teaches the art of writing effective cover letters and has a burgeoning career as a ...”