“... apparently ubiquitous when one creature attempts to convey information to another. The dawn chorus may enchant or irritate at 4 a.m. but, if it irritates you, spare a thought for the singers, who are exhausting themselves in the effort. As is the kudu, when it wields its enormous horns, or the lyrebird dragging its fantastic tail, or the Great Bustard, in its ...”

“... on. He had hoped that Wittgenstein would approve of what he had been writing, but when they met in May 1913, Wittgenstein told him that it was all wrong, and, as Russell admitted to Ottoline Morrell, he did not know how to answer Wittgenstein’s objections. He never published the whole of what he had written, and it is likely that what he did publish was the ...”

“... to all and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what country, class or creed the other may belong. (At least, that was the rule when I was a boy: it’s been trimmed down since. The Scout Laws are not immutable, as Paul Fussell supposes.) Let me draw friendly, fraternal attention to certain differences between the British and American ...”

“... miles gloriosus, the military boaster or eternal bag of bullshit’. So he might seem, but readers may feel that this Farthing is no soldier and that Mr Brown is surely a professional actor. We turn the page, expecting them to be exposed as liars. Then the style changes. We are surprised by a genuine page of news items reproduced from the Gentleman’s ...”

“... None of us, individually, it may be, want to be caring or cultured or classless, or to belong to a particular class. The three C’s are for other people. In repudiating the categories, we repudiate, in one sense, the society we live in – a very practical example of Marxian alienation. And a significant one, because caring, culture and class are all more or less modern concepts ...”

“... respectable locality. The fact that the ghost is not the owner-occupier, regrettable as it may be, is nothing new; and if a ghost chooses io be semi-detached, then that – as any student of structuralism will realise has a certain logical consistency to it. But with ghosts as with people, it is not where you are but what you are which matters: and ...”

“... and place, and did not expect to make new Spartans out of the slum-dwellers of Paris. In this he may have benefited from reading Montesquieu. Hampson himself is well aware of the force of circumstances here, especially as they affected Robespierre. Nevertheless, the Incorruptible got from Rousseau a belief in the people as naturally virtuous, and as victims ...”

“... absurdity of novel-writing with a shrug and a smile of apparent shamelessness. You, the reader, may settle your fable-land in your own fashion. Anything you like happens in fable-land. Wicked folks die ... annoying folks are got out of the way ... the hero and heroine happy ever after ... Ah, happy harmless fable-land, where these things are! Friendly ...”

“... for the work – probably about the strongest reproach he thought it prudent to make. The offer may in fact have been intended as a fairly gracious recognition of his popularity as a writer for children, but by the standards of his friends, and what seemed Gay’s legitimate expectations, it wasn’t half gracious enough. Some of the blame for his frequent ...”

“... economic analysis as the tool best adapted to the exploration and adjustment of the law. This may seem a cheap shot, but there is a telling passage in Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes: Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously ...”

“... delatology. One is that it need not confine itself to dictatorships. ‘Practices of denunciation may be found close to home as well as far away,’ they say on the first page. ‘Denunciatory statements may be solicited from individuals by police during interrogations ... or by public bodies like Royal Commissions or the ...”

“... thirty Astronomical Units of another star. Aliens with technology much more advanced than ours may be able to detect the probe before then, otherwise it’ll be a while before we get a reply.The Voyager probes, launched in 1977, carried much more information, in the form of a copper phonograph record in a gold-plated cover etched with the diagrams from the ...”

“... are being tested in a short space of time under conditions that are hard to monitor. The patient may have a cough or a fever, or be short of breath – but there are also many cases of asymptomatic infection, making an outbreak significantly harder to contain.Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, where the virus emerged, was locked down on 23 January. Since ...”

“... pages of The Mirror and the Light dropped with a thud through my letterbox – some letterboxes may require modification to accommodate its girth. It covers a little more than four years of historical time, from the execution of Anne Boleyn in May 1536 to (no spoilers here, since this is where the whole three-act tragedy ...”

“... are patient, thoughtful and often imaginative, only occasionally, as the quotations in this piece may show, sounding genuinely old-fashioned as distinct from carefully archaic. As we read, we find ourselves asking why the desperately contemporary (or enduring) figures in these poems are dressed up like this, talking like this? Why are they pretending to be ...”