“... original contribution to biology. Further, the contribution itself was of an unusual kind. Unlike David Lack’s classic Life of the Robin – also an original contribution in popular form – The Selfish Gene reports no new facts. Nor does it contain any new mathematical models – indeed it contains no mathematics at all. What it does offer is a new world ...”

“... provide. The signs now are of a swing back to a different, more literal translation of the Bible. David Rosenberg’s The Book of J (1990) reads very differently from things like the Good News Bible or the Revised English Bible: The man named his wife Hava: she would have all who live, smooth the way, mother.     Now Yahweh made clothes from skins of ...”

“... acted as a guide, compiled for an unnamed milordo in about 1766 a summary of sage advice: on the means and cost of transport, food (beware of salads with too much oil but ‘a cold tongue or a piece of roast beef in the chaise will prove an excellent companion’), clothing (black velvet coat and Lyon silk waistcoat for winter), necessary medicines, company ...”

“... for Mallory and Irvine having made it to the top? Before last year, this was unproven (but by no means disproved). It remains so still, even now that Mallory has been found, tantalisingly, with his watch and altimeter broken, without a camera, with his goggles in his pocket. Ironically, we may never know more; even if another expedition goes back, as is ...”

“... of uncharismatic right-wing leaders came to an end with the accession to the party leadership of David Cameron, a smoother, less straightforward kind of Conservative. Cameron recognised that if he was to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand, loosen its association with uncaring Thatcherite economics, then he needed to explode the assumption that the Conservatives ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that remark, arguing ...”

“... study, which followed a cohort of 17,000 born in 1970. Cohort studies are an unusually powerful means of teasing out causes and effects in sociology and medicine. To take just one example, a comparison of the data across the three cohorts shows that a rise in obesity during the 1980s affected all three at the same time, probably due to changes in ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... Auden himself. Biographers have two options. The first is to choose a strong narrative line, which means travelling light when it comes to what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. The other is to put together a portrait ‘from the life’, which is what Parker has done. This book is not, primarily, about Isherwood’s career, but about ...”

“... days after the birth of their daughter, the future Mary Shelley.Wollstonecraft was described by David Bromwich as ‘the first modern theorist of an idea of individuality’. She strove to effect change not only in the structures of male domination, suggesting, for example, that women should be represented in Parliament, but in the social and psychological ...”

“... Who shall paint the chameleon, who can tether a broomstick?’ wrote J.M. Keynes of David Lloyd George in 1919. ‘How can I convey to the reader ... any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ This passage was left out of the original text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, because Keynes felt that he had tried and failed to do justice to the British prime minister’s baffling complexity of character ...”

“... an instrument by which people simplify, rationalise and retell social complexities. It’s a means to haul the abstract, the global and the relative into the realm of the concrete, the local and the absolute. It’s a way to lay claim to faith in certain values. If those who attempt to interpret the world do so only through the prism of professional ...”

“... park lit with a curious violet effect. An interviewer in Diary of a Young Soul Rebel thinks of David Lynch and Hitchcock in relation to this scene, and certainly those names evoke the right sort of frozen ceriness. But there is excitement in the shot, too – a sense of sexual adventure. The mood is lyrical rather than frightening, and it is into this mood ...”

“... pitiless focus on racialism have ensured that there is scant hiding-place for the undecided. This means that a lot of American clergymen are getting prime time without, for once, having to pay for it by the electronic collection plate. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx said, rather aptly, that men learning a new language always begin by translating it back into ...”

“... in a unique position to observe Churchill and the Empire at bay. The worst – and that of course means the best – is yet to ...”