“... is the great unsolved problem of biology.’ Among philosophers, the most influential work was David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind (1996): ‘Consciousness is the biggest mystery.’ Thomas Huxley wrote, 140 years ago: We class sensations along with emotions and volitions and thoughts, under the common head of states of consciousness. But what ...”

“... literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models (and they are very obviously to be detected) in Dickens, J.B. Priestley ...”

“... sell: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, The Latino Studies Reader, The Science Studies Reader, The Green Studies Reader, The Disability Studies Reader, The Language and Cultural Studies Reader. Routledge has dibs on the definite article: their Cultural Studies Reader should not be confused with the knockoff What Is Cultural Studies? A Reader, any more than ...”

“... think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he calls ‘the smart state’. Smart to Mr Cameron seems to mean doing as little as one can get away with and calling it enterprise. Smart as in smart alec, smart of the smart ...”

“... Roundheads and jubilant Cavaliers, the explanation for all the cars some mock-battle in Green Park. Note how one passes these far from sheepish figures without a second glance; the kind of extraordinary feature of ordinary life that never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the ...”

“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... sediment settles behind Glen Canyon Dam and what was once a hot red river emerges as a cool green one, too cool for many of its species of endangered fish. Occasionally a thunderstorm over a tributary sends down enough sediment to turn it red again for a day or two. Along the way, the river is grabbed and squeezed for water to make the cities explode in ...”

“... the side of the regime.  A chat with a prominent economic commentator. He sees definite signs of green shoots. The stock market and the pound are rising, the banks and the housing market have stabilised. ‘The measures taken last autumn have stopped an immediate crisis.’  Rumours that unnamed backbenchers are organising a round robin letter, calling on ...”

“... bribery, according to a recent Buzzfeed investigation, with the FBI offering to exchange a green card for information. The smaller the group of people you are looking for in comparison to the size of the population, and the lower your tolerance for missing even one of them, the greater the number of false positives your search will produce. This is why ...”

“... And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold ...”

“... the pondweed. A servant must have been at hand, for Leeuwenhoek wrote: ‘I then had some of this green plant to which these Eggs were attached brought to my house.’ Later, in his study, he closed in with his razors and his microscope – an instrument invented some eighty years before, but which he was now deploying with unprecedented finesse. Having ...”

“... ambivalent about children before she had them and their arrival did nothing to change her mind. David Nettleship John was ‘a comic little fellow’, she reported, ‘but he grumbles such a fearful lot. I think he would very much rather not have been created.’ As one pregnancy followed another she gave up painting and, since their income did not ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... graduate of Temple University, Emira works on Tuesdays and Thursdays as a transcriber at her local Green Party office and the rest of the week as a childminder for the white, upper-middle-class Chamberlain family. In making Emira work for a political party that makes almost no impression in a decidedly two-party country, Reid is telling us something about ...”