“... curious thing is that even automation, from which it derives, only showed its face in 1948. (You may have thought you saw the word earlier, in the 1669 edition of S. Patrick’s Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men, but that, cackles the OED, was just ‘a misprint for automaton’.) And how did we manage to do without tee-off, given that golfing ...”

“... with Adams are also quite revealing. As an uncompromising Republican – however suspicious he may have been of direct democracy – Adams disdained ‘Franklinian politicks’. Since Franklin was popular at Versailles, Adams reasoned quite logically that he had to be corrupt, secretly, just as the French were, openly. But because Adams was a genuine ...”

“... and I am afraid they will have to take me away – so please forgive me – all those I love and may God forgive me too, but I cannot bear the agony and it is best for everyone this way. The future is just old age and pain ...”

“... he regards travel-writing as ‘a minor form of autobiography’. Writers like Norman Lewis may travel the world invisibly and unselfconsciously, their subject and destination the lives of others to the specific exclusion of their own, but Theroux’s journeys are ultimately only his own. In The Pillars of Hercules, moreover, the preponderance of ...”

“... of probabilities reflects the balance of your knowledge and your ignorance. And very often it may not even be possible to alter that ratio of known to unknown, however the absolute amount of your knowledge grows: some systems are simply not mechanistic in a way that allows their changing states to be predicted. The famous example is ...”

“... of the West. The territorial divisions agreed between the Great Powers after the First World War may be arbitrary, but in the modern world, territorial units are meshed into an international system and it is the primary interest of the élites controlling those units to weld them into states using whatever force is necessary and the best available ...”

“... It’s a sorry, sour performance: not to be read by nostalgic Chelsea fans until after 17 ...”

“... bought one of the countless contemporary books that tell you what your dreams mean: not what they may reveal about your past or your soul, but what they predict about your future. The pervasiveness of such oneirokrites, or dream interpretations, in Greece represents both a continuity with the past and the country’s essential doubleness: they are a ...”

“... full of mundane matter,    like conversation, in which news and wit    and Essays upon Woman may all fit; where metre and rhyme-pattern make a frame     wherein the voice can have and feel at home.                           A Reply to Intercepted Mail (1979) All this is as nothing, however, beside what Armitage and Maxwell ...”

“... hypothesis,/The plain shrewd Briton will dismiss/Such notions ... ’ The plain shrewd Briton may well feel a drowsy numbness when faced with a sentence like this: ‘Gout also appealed to the rhetorical frame of mind, tapped into its already acculturated versions of analogy and personification by creating a new discourse of the fallen.’ But it is not ...”

“... of the string, and rules that are probabilistic in character (so that what you get at each stage may depend on the outcome of a random process). As Stewart points out, the more complicated L-systems have been very successful in generating computer images of mature plants and of the stages through which they grow. So what? How are these formal games relevant ...”

“... be thought to be making a fashion statement. I won’t do it, though. Adjustment and freedom may have trouble getting on with each other: what David Reisman seems not to have known is that autonomy can be quite pointless as well as quite ...”

“... book she is given Juliet Mitchell’s The Woman Question and for a moment it seems as if Mitchell may descend like a dea ex machina, an anti-Princess Margaret, to make all right. Alas, our last glimpse of Tennant, in February 1969, when she is in hospital having just given birth, is not promising. There are no coloured ribbons on the crib. She tells the ...”

“... but rarely displayed in non-avant-garde novels). There is some play with the idea that a person may do the work of Fate by shaping her intention to conform with it, a point Augustine would have been willing to discuss. Indeed, there is evidence that the whole business of narrative, of the nature and purpose of plotting, and of the interaction between the ...”

“... of Fraser gratefully remembered the Holroyd family: ‘Its upper-class lightheartedness and devil-may-care attitude was in such contrast to my own background.’ So, no doubt, their behaviour appeared to a clever foreign adult, but the boy, left to the care of a nurse and an aunt early disappointed in love, cannot have found it helpful. In one farcical ...”