“... curiosity and acquisitiveness as well as horror and pity. ‘I came to understand that we may look to the powerful and potent symbolic and symbiotic relationships between big and small as a means to understand … how and why we construct the world around us.’ So she maps the fantastic imagination onto actual instances of out of the ordinary bodies ...”

“... After all, there’s a strange sort of authenticity about a man who lies straight to your face.24 ...”

“... Stein: ‘Call anybody Paul and they get to be a Paul.’) During this stretch of the book, we may start to think, as Paul does, that he’s really, ‘like, chemically or something’, a woman – that he’ll settle in a true, final state. He follows Diane to Provincetown but she breaks his heart (‘You want to be everything, all the time … I just ...”

“... and on the limitations of the written word in articulating practical knowledge. Her title may seem at first to prioritise language, but in the end her book demonstrates its inadequacy. She admits that we must accept ‘approximating concepts and terms’: ‘skill’, ‘Kunst’, ‘cunning’, ‘working knowledge’ and ‘artisanal ...”

“... if she were to ‘live in some convenient place without possessing of her kingdom, where she may not move any new troubles’ – ideally, an English prison, far from the coast. Her trial for complicity in Darnley’s murder, which Elizabeth authorised, was ostensibly a ‘conference’ between Mary and the Scottish lords who were calling for her ...”

“... he can do nothing but brood over the details of the interrogation, tortured by the thought that he may have betrayed others by giving away too much or hurt himself by giving away too little. In a concentration camp one would, perhaps, have had to wheel stones until one’s hands bled and one’s feet froze in one’s boots; one would have been packed in ...”

“... it is – or we are – waging war. The IDF didn’t play any role in either of the Gulf wars and may not play a part in Bush’s pending war in Iran, but it is on permanent alert for the real war that is always just round the corner. Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect. (In July it killed 176 ...”

“... That would leave open the possibility that, if a kind of creature is pretty fit overall, there may be room for it to acquire traits that don’t themselves contribute to its fitness; or, indeed, traits that militate against its fitness. A passion for opera, for example. Anyhow, a lot of Mithen’s book is dedicated to imagining a variety of scenarios in ...”

“... will filch it. Moore has even complained of Clarke flattening the flat tax. The flat tax may well be right for, say, the new economies of Eastern Europe, but in long-established economies like those of the United States and Western Europe it would be largely a device for making the rich richer, which is no doubt why it appeals to the neo-cons here ...”

“... once from her expression that he was not the only one who had been afraid that her absence . . . may have brought these silent encounters of theirs to an end’. He sent her a letter through her maid, declaring his love, even though they had not yet spoken a word to one another. He was unexpectedly – blissfully – promoted to lieutenant, sure it was ...”

“... set the tone for each collection. And her choice of form (she only writes short stories) may well be influenced by this material no sooner grasped than gone, these shape-changing offspring. Many writers, even most writers, at least since Goethe and Wordsworth, have explored what it means to have been children; we all have that experience in ...”

“... John Smith had scarcely landed in Virginia in 1607 when he wrote that in America, ‘every man may be the master and owner of his own labour and land.’ This vision of economic freedom was to draw millions of newcomers to North America and inspired a relentless westward flow of population. Dispossessing the Indians was, from the beginning, intrinsic to ...”

“... the Duke of Bedford – to his own advantage. He posed as a moderator of disputes at play and may well have done good service in that line, but he apparently did nothing to exclude sharpers from the rooms. The opportunities to lead gulls to the plucking were plentiful. Eventually, a string of new laws banning certain games of hazard had a disastrous ...”

“... agreed that mirrors, or their substitutes, portraits, are places where hidden realities may be revealed: it is the portrait in the attic that shows the inner loathsomeness of the outwardly attractive Dorian Gray. Folktales and legends are full of examples of truth-telling mirrors. In any number of ghost stories the silent presence of the ghost can ...”

“... without himself being the originator of any of the major ideas on which he actually worked. This may be the reason why his great contribution to the war effort has not been properly appreciated, but those of us who really knew what he did have an unbounded admiration for his contribution to our winning the war. After the war, Bernal had a hard time getting ...”