“... demand for organic products and inform supermarket managers’ purchasing policies. Listeners may discern Harvey’s organic sympathies in the storyline of the soap – though there are often counter-arguments for balance, in good BBC style. And grass gets into just about everything in The Archers: even Brian Aldridge’s current infidelity was ...”

“... translated into English as In Northern Mists – Nansen proposed that Pytheas may have sailed north from Shetland with a south-westerly wind and a favourable current towards the north-east, and have arrived off the coast of Norway in the Romsdal or Nordmøre district, where the longest day of the year was of 21 hours . . . From here he ...”

“... of different males fight for supremacy – this is sperm competition. At the same time, the female may be able to select the sperm that are best for her – this is sperm choice. This is the true battle of the sexes. The males and females of each species are permanently locked in a struggle to out-evolve each other as their reproductive equipment and behaviour ...”

“... forms an ambiguous apex where the two kinds of story – myth and history, both fictional – may or may not meet. The novel is a kaleidoscope of triangles: myth, history, literature; Sol, Jakob, Ruth; Atalanta, Meilanion, Meleager; Sol, Thyella, her lover Xanthos, whose name means ‘yellow’, which associates him ...”

“... reasoned hypothesis) as one component of ‘adequate historical explanation’. Its propositions may not be susceptible of proof; but if we talked only about what we could prove, our commentaries on the past, and on the present, would be too jejune to retain attention. Williamson distances himself from the problem by collapsing the distinction between the ...”

“... its modern meaning of ‘fake’ or ‘insincere’, ‘plastic’ has made a circuit. Though we may deplore artificial manners we invest in artificial intelligence. And now that the art of plastics resides in science and technology, we are curiously nostalgic and indulgent towards those mid-century years of plastic pocketbooks and Lucite belt ...”

“... for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a curious creative amalgam of old and new, uniting great feeling for his country, its traditions and language, with the ...”

“... his lust to love.’ This could have been adapted as a mission statement for Mills and Boon. There may have been stories in which a righteous male tamed the lusts of an over-sexed woman, but I have not come across them. Charles Boon laid down basic rules for authors. A happy ending was essential, which meant marriage or the promise of it. Stories were to be ...”

“... element in her writing. Her pleasure in food was certainly connected with her enjoyment of sex. It may not, as Cooper says, have been literally true that when they were at sea Cowan used to tie David naked to the mast and whip her, but the mere possibility explains a lot about her ability to make ‘an omelette and a glass of wine’ sound so ...”

“... the relation in which these poems stand to the originals’. Their fluent and alert English may have veiled the fact, but it was impossible to forget that they had been translated: the references to Unamuno and other friends of Machado’s saw to that, as did the vivid at-homeness of the poems in what was unmistakably their own Spanish landscape. Such ...”

“... and Irn Bru, and the great new self-help ethos has had little trouble finding local imitators. It may be an indirect part of Princess Diana’s legacy to the British nation, the success of The Little Book of Calm, but self-help has had its main British impact on television. Trinny and Susannah have just come back with a new series of What Not to Wear, a show ...”

“... was ‘an amateur artist who, on vacations, used to paint funny faces on tennis balls’. Marvin may have suggested the packet colour: pink. It was instantly popular: ‘Packets were swiped from restaurants and stolen from hospitals,’ Cohen says. A&P, the supermarket chain, came calling, and pretty soon every diner in America offered Sweet’N Low ...”

“... York Times piece about the incursions into Haifa Street, entitled ‘There are signs that the tide may be turning on Iraq’s street of fear’; it seemed to be well informed – until I noticed that it was dated 21 March 2005. It was an optimistic account of one of the US army’s previous failed offensives in Haifa Street. In his State of the Union speech ...”

“... Papers’, against writing about the too distant past. His ‘visitable past’, ‘a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table’, is more or less anything within living memory: accessing it is like ‘looking over a garden wall into another garden’. Beyond that, he cautions, ‘a succession ...”

“... chosen its candidates. I almost felt sorry for the smiling face of Peter Odili. British audiences may remember him as the governor of Rivers State in the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s richest state: last year he entertained a Channel 4 film crew in his throne room with Cristal champagne, which costs more per bottle than the large majority of his subjects earn in a ...”