“... that Darwin stole the idea of transmutation through natural selection from the Calcutta naturalist Edward Blyth, and then tried to cover his tracks. Wilson quotes Blyth selectively from a tendentious source, but if he had consulted the original he would have seen that far from anticipating Darwin, Blyth maintained that ‘Providence’ works to preserve the ...”

“... and suffering from the previous night’s exploits take over the narration in the staccato of young adult fiction (‘Legend night. But OMG that taxi driver. Creepy.’) A few paragraphs later, we’re with Margaret Rose and Jane, on the hunt for a miracle cure for the fast-declining Shane. They consider ‘a drop of blessed oil of St Thérèse of Lisieux ...”

“... and responds to the indignation of a woman who has read in the newspaper that one in eight young people has never seen a cow in real life.The first part of the novel becomes a satire of white guilt as it’s performed and experienced online. ‘White people,’ she observes, ‘were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice.’ In the ...”

“... the keepers takes place only at the end of the book, and when Mr Ramsay springs ‘lightly like a young man’ out of the boat and onto the rock, he disappears from the narrative.As an enigmatic symbol, the lighthouse has long held an imaginative appeal. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on ...”

“... figure since Layamon’s. What a fate for the hammer of the Saxons, the great obverse of Edward I! All these arguments create in the end a strange, mixed, twiddle-the-tuning-knob kind of effect. I feel sure Lucas is wrong in general, and wrong just because of that culturally-biased, bend-over-backwards, self-exculpating mode so characteristic of the ...”

“... in the first half of the 18th century, as Gilmour contends. But as he also points out, Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt in 1745 to upset that regime met with minimal popular support. Indeed, the Young Pretender was resisted far more vigorously by all classes in England and in Scotland than is suggested here. Crushing ...”

“... Suez had nearly wrecked, being no less successful in establishing close collaboration with the young President Kennedy than with his old wartime friend Eisenhower. He was slower to see his way in Europe. Britain fiddled around with the European Free Trade Area – something to which, despite all the evidence to the contrary, some Conservatives still think ...”

“... less likely to evoke a major response from law-enforcement agencies. Their perpetrators tend to be young, male and (more contentiously) from working-class backgrounds. It may be appropriate here to invoke the concept of a ‘surrogate racial attack’: the anonymous bogus tip-off to a social services department or an environmental health officer about ...”

“... tree, “dazzled and swept up” by these powerful tales, which made a permanent impression on the young boy.’ This account (as given by Steinbeck in later life) directly echoes Walter Scott’s reminiscence in his autobiography of how his bookish Aunt Jenny gave him a copy of Percy’s Reliques: ‘I remember well the spot where I read these volumes for the ...”

“... showcase there is a mahogany cigar-box bearing the simple inscription “The Fort”. This was Edward III’s personal humidor.’ And the visit ends: ‘I said good-bye to the shop but it didn’t answer back. Shops never do. Old man Proudhon was right: property is deaf.’ Cigar-smoking is also described as quite a simple business. You make some sort of ...”

“... might in law have been allowed’. The Institutes of that Whig hero of Parliamentary liberty, Sir Edward Coke, ruled out votes for women; and radicals like John Lilburne, whose tiresomeness as a husband is enjoyably recounted by Fraser, did nothing to restore them, even though contested Parliamentary elections had become more frequent, and even though ...”

“... haunted by the knowledge that his methods as thinker and prophet as much resembled those of Uncle Edward Ponderevo, promoter of the world-famous patent medicine Tono-Bungay, as they did those of Plato and Marx. For one thing, did he not, just like Uncle Ponderevo, construct his campaigns around slogans? And do not the slogans – ‘the competent ...”

“... a very difficult because compacted poem, evidently arose from a terrible accident to a young man. And an extraordinary poem, ‘Wanting to live in Harlem’, from Final Solutions, makes irrefutable connections between a boy growing up in St Louis, dreams of a fair black woman, two boys in Harlem, and an account – taken from the Cambridge Ancient ...”

“... Institute movement, while her younger sister, an accomplished violinist, married the late Sir Edward (subsequently the first Lord) Bridges. Eventually the standard pattern of home education gave way to formal schooling. The first schools were a ‘kind of extended family unit’, often established in the home of a widow for whom the opening of a small ...”

“... it was merely an appendix to the country, the future was in the hands of the thousands of bright young men and women my colleagues and I would train. We would win, without the sherry or the Trinity Ball or the Elizabethan Society. McDowell and Webb think well of Trinity, and why not? They are so closely identified with the College that to think well of it ...”