“... Heavy Dancers is in certain ways an important and revealing document, even if in ways the author may not have intended. Although he has made no self-conscious effort to do so, Thompson has managed to suggest a great deal here about how the peace movement has gained its strength and how it may, in the course of things, lose ...”

“... by a sort of amicable Collision.’ Johnson considered Shaftesbury a reckless freethinker, but we may see in the Club, beyond its immediate therapeutic role for Johnson, an ambitious development of Shaftesbury’s ideal within an intellectual elite. The founding nine members included men (there were no women) who were there primarily as friends of ...”

“... of fuel for most of its vehicles in southern Gaza, limiting its ability to maintain order. On 7 May, World Central Kitchen, which had been delivering millions of meals to Gaza, ran out of provisions; on 12 May the World Health Organisation said it was running very low on medical supplies. During this period Israel ...”

“... middle class, an impression sometimes reinforced by the hint of beaky arrogance in his face. It may well be the arrogance that is traditionally the soul-food of champions, but there has been dark talk of links with the Young Conservatives. Coe’s sister Miranda is an elegant model – the family is strong on legs – though she doubles (possibly a ...”

“... us to make the right predictions, and none of the other stances would work so well. Sceptics may (and do) deny this fact, but here is a small-scale demonstration of how the intentional stance appears to be built into our modes of understanding. Suppose I tell you: ‘When Alice found Bill in bed with Christine, she took the ring off her finger and flung ...”

“... secret compartments and false bottoms. The two contending schools of literary interpretation today may be compared to two sorts of baggage inspector. The first simply searches your belongings for signs that you are who you say you are; the second is more concerned to establish your guilt by planting some offending item upon you. On the one hand are the ...”

“... and, manifestly lacking the endorsement of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens – there may be twelve million users in the USA – compromises respect for the law and the police. Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar’s argument, however, is that marijuana should be legalised because of its medicinal properties. Its benefits as a general ...”

“... genetics, and enthusiastic about the potential benefits. On occasion, however, this enthusiasm may have more to do with the pure excitement of the science than with any very clear practical consequences in the foreseeable future. The most commonly heard justification of the billions currently being spent on the Human Genome Project is that it will lead to ...”

“... of intermarriage, despite hundreds of thousands of years of separate evolution. Although this may be possible in principle, it is unlikely in practice, because of the zoological observation that species with extensive ranges tend to fray at the edges. There are several examples of animals which belong to the same species, but to opposite ends of its ...”

“... an entryist organisation, a Militant Tendency of the Gospel. The analogy with Trotskyist sects may be unfair. Christian socialists do not meet secretly, do not act as a caucus, do not form a party within a party – or not as far as we know. Nor do they have the doctrinal stridency, the ideological unity and the monolithic structure of neo-Leninist ...”

“... to presuppose moral ‘cognitivism’: the agent recognises goodness as an objective property that may be instantiated by his actions. By ascribing it to an action, he comes to know an objective truth – that his action is (or will be) good. This makes some philosophers nervous, because it suggests a metaphysics they don’t like the look of, whereby goodness ...”

“... to mean ‘compulsive scribbling’, unaware that a cacoethes was in fact a malignant tumour; he may claim the forgiveness of all who suppose that an inferiority complex is the mark of a wimp or that a quantum leap is long. One of the easier mistakes in translating from a foreign language is giving a word the sense most familiar in one’s own day. It is ...”

“... twenty years, but had not yet published. ‘So all my originality,’ he wrote, ‘whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.’ History, however, has been kinder to Darwin than he feared, and it is Wallace who has been relegated to the footnotes. In fact, what was in many ways Wallace’s finest hour may paradoxically ...”

“... group – among them, its leader, Donald DeFreeze – died in a Los Angeles police shoot-out in May 1974, and a further three (including Hearst) were arrested 14 months later. Escaping arrest, Soliah had gone underground, changed her name to Sara Jane Olson and built a new life for herself as the wife of a suburban doctor. In December 2001, she was ...”

“... was later translated into Old English, and further expanded by his near namesake Aelfric Bata, who may have been schoolmaster at Christ Church, Canterbury, and who wrote Colloquia of his own. Despite these admirable efforts, Latin was and remained a hard language to master. Reading some of Orme’s examples, one begins to wonder how anyone ever learned ...”