“... his mental state is happier – more creative, more fertile – when off drugs, even though he may have lost all control physically. Apart from the ability to think more creatively, the very sense of being solely dependent on his own wit and resources to score victories over the disease which is affecting his muscles is a source of pride and ...”

“... would gladly ride with Annette once more up to the little old ruined chapel, by the bridge – she may remember – where we took shelter in a thunderstorm. This is because she is part of the Past, while Ladies This, That and the Other are of this present time which wearies me ...1 Browning did not idealise this ‘Past’, but felt it as a passion of love ...”

“... by negligence, when the ship is taken aback. A steam-powered ship cannot suffer this fate, and few may know that the familiar expression has a nautical origin. According to Sir John Richardson, as quoted in the OED, it happens thus: ‘when through a shift of wind or bad steerage, the wind comes in front of the square sails and lays them back against the ...”

“... groups’, small bands that would, in theory, stick together on Monday morning, come what may. I was absorbed by the Bad Parents, named for a couple from New Jersey who had joined Occupy at the request of their teenage daughter. The three of them were willing to risk arrest and wanted to know what to expect. A few minutes later we were role-playing ...”

“... reach and dissipate more easily from the edges; and in some tree species a range of leaf shapes may be found on different parts of the plant, according to their exposure to the sun (and hence, incidentally, the size of fossil leaves can sometimes be a useful clue to past climates). A covering of fine hairs can control temperature too, reducing the amount of ...”

“... be loveable in the absence of almost all the old favourites that have made them so. The effect may be a bit like going to a concert by the Stones or the Who and being offered only stuff from their latest album. The limitations of the Academy’s collection, including as it does the only landscapes by the Big Three that could be described in some degree as ...”

“... aftermath of September 11 – just manages to stir, spookily, with its own grey form-life. It may be true that cuteness looms a lot of the time as an Orozco temptation. The Foucault pendulum billiard table is cute, and so are the pairs of yellow motorbikes snapped in the city, and the axiometric two-wheelers. I couldn’t give a toss for the squeezed ...”

“... that amounts to a ‘fundamental breach of [the president’s] oath of office’. The best hope may be that the whistleblowers multiply to such an extent that popular imbecility is no match for their accumulated weight and direction. A casualty of the erratic progress of the impeachment may turn out to be the candidacy of ...”

“... accidents weren’t random. Murder victims – in London in 1665, there were just nine of them – may not have deserved to die, but their deaths weren’t seen as contrary to divine will. Discerning patterns in chaos is a human characteristic in any age: if these interpretations fit our needs they help us accept our fate. Accidents, according to Spence, are ...”

“... of the 1980s. (There’s no simple way of saying exactly what a given level of the VIX means. You may remember from school that a ‘standard deviation’ measures the amount by which, in aggregate, a characteristic such as people’s height varies from its average. The VIX is a sort of standard deviation, modified for the particularities of finance, and ...”

“... of skinShe is left ‘holding water, feeling nothing’.The anaesthetised slice under water which may end it all is a Robertson signature moment. He often writes as though a poetic image itself has an anaesthetising effect. A poem gruesomely entitled ‘The Halving’ relates having open heart surgery, and ‘A&E’ describes a visit to Casualty afterwards ...”

“... non-uniform motion (one of the irregularities of the divinely regular universe), the mechanism may have used a gear on a slotted arm within another gear, or a pin-and-slot device, or perhaps both. The mechanism is a product not just of Greek knowledge, but of Egyptian and Mesopotamian learning, and may have been destined ...”

“... and many ingenious devices. Some of these – like filling a fifth of the book with pictures – may strike purists as cheating. But couching each chapter as a literary essay is definitely a good idea, since quotation, especially of poetry, takes up a lot of space. So do capsule biography and paraphrase; de Botton generates almost four pages by rearranging ...”

“... for all these reasons they are easily romanticised. But the Bolivian left also has weaknesses that may ultimately impede its progress. Primary among these is its tendency towards an ultra-left anti-statism, unfortunately encouraged by the NGOs as they almost invariably push for small-scale ‘local’, ‘democratic’, ‘self-sufficient’ initiatives and ...”

“... second is the alleged involvement of a government intelligence network or operation (as when on 22 May 1973, Nixon justified his participation in the cover-up by explaining that he had believed, erroneously, that the CIA was implicated).’ Spies deceive each other, the public, committees of inquiry, and finally the man from whom they claim to take their ...”