“... this view in 1859, declaring in the penultimate paragraph of On the Origin of Species: ‘We may look with some confidence to a secure future ... As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.’ Increasingly, however, Darwin and his followers came to ...”

“... never writes with an eye to the things that are best left unsaid, even if, like Little Hans, one may think them. She will tell you, for example, that poverty in Zimbabwe is better ‘in this sunlight, this beauty, than let’s say, Bradford or Leeds’. Or she will chart a course for treacherous subjects like aid, muddy the waters with a few contentious ...”

“... to make money or by inducing a knee-jerk reaction on the Left. Reaganism’s defence of tradition may have appealed to the members of the President’s kitchen cabinet but it had no real foundation beyond a spurious link between morality and religious faith. Bromwich’s quite nasty attacks on Reagan – whose great work was ‘the education of a whole ...”

“... the Fifties, quotes Eden as writing just before he resigned the premiership in January 1957: ‘It may be than the United States’s attitude to us in the Middle East dates from our refusal to give up Buraimi.’ And Burrows asks: ‘Can it really have been that important?’ It was. Strictly speaking, Buraimi was one desert village in the middle of ...”

“... best friend ‘buying a jade leather coat just to match the jade line on her new car’. One may think of it as a return to the spirit of Versailles in more ways than one, but the writer felt that it demonstrated a new ‘ordered scheme of fitness’ in design – and it was undoubtedly typical of what the French understood as Modernism. The garden ...”

“... Creoles had access to the highest positions except that of viceroy. This dispersal of power may account for New Spain’s remarkable tolerance of personal aberrations – so long as the basic principles of the established order were not called into question. Juana’s bastardy was no impediment to her acceptance at court. Her mother had six children by ...”

“... in imaginary space. This view allows the possibility, contrary to Aristotle, that space may be infinitely extended and that our cosmos may be only one world among many situated in such a space. Oddly enough, in his account of the impact of the Condemnation, Blumenberg does not discuss Bradwardine’s views, nor ...”

“... could then buy enough shares in the market to get control that way (the rule being that a predator may not buy in the market at anything above his own bid). But then, I said, what happens if the whole market takes a nose-dive and our shares and the predator’s both plunge by 30 per cent? Oh in that case, I was told, every one of your shareholders will be ...”

“... years ago’, Lehman concedes: But though the local reputations of the ‘boa-deconstructors’ may show some slippage, the larger problem has not fundamentally changed. Pure deconstruction is no longer the height of fashion, but the impulse continues in alloyed form, and it is as ubiquitous as ever ... The edicts of deconstruction – merged, to whatever ...”

“... author stands. The curiously affectless tone of the narrative – even in its tragic climax – may be something aimed at, or it may indicate some failure to achieve the exact tone Scruton wants. Whatever, Francesca leaves the reader stimulated, mildly infuriated, and seriously baffled. ‘Final exams were ...”

“... rhetorical error of any political party by apologising for its own past: the Conservatives may ignore their own past, but they never apologise for it. Labour has done this partly because of the utopianism of many of its activists – to them the best is always the enemy of the good – and partly because of a certain timid and innocent ...”

“... texts. Norman White is more expansive than Robert Martin about the influence the Welsh language may possibly have had on Hopkins’s poetry. From 1874 to 1877 he was studying theology at St Bueno’s College in North Wales at the end of which time he was ordained priest. During these years the Deutschland was wrecked and the poem written. As he says in the ...”

“... to observe wistfully. The mayor of Brussels was a suitor in her widowhood, and Conrad himself may have proposed and been turned down, although they continued to be on very affectionate terms, and Conrad seems to have expected his wife to wait on Marguerite when she came to visit them in later life. He always had an eye for a grande dame, but Jessie was ...”

“... violent – the belief in race and nation. Riddle? Farce? Silence? The regimes of Eastern Europe may have been oppressive and iniquitous, but the fiction and poetry written under them were for a time quite outstanding. This was partly because of the system, which was oddly literary in outlook and valued writers, though of course not as much as ...”

“... retained the mind-set of the inter-war years and saw no need for radical change. And what, it may be asked, was wrong with that? These people (few of whom in fact had ‘upper class’ backgrounds) were impregnated with the kind of social conscience that had become commonplace among the professional classes since the days of ‘New Liberals’ like ...”