“... under some conditions, of copying themselves and reinserting at various places in the DNA. They may also pick up adjacent genes and carry them about. Jumping genes may have only trivial effects on evolution; but Wills argues the opposite. Some environmental changes, or shocks, ...”

“... There are already strains, with no longer any grand external danger to counteract them. Trade wars may come back; not much later, shapes of the past like the old Franco-Russian combination against Germany. A new, bigger combination of Europe and Japan against the American hegemony is not impossible to imagine; or of Europe and America against Japan and the Far ...”

“... So on what do the claims made for Poussin’s mind ultimately rest? To answer this question it may be worth considering the subject of the painting that inspired Bernini’s remark. Its pendant, the Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion, depicts two slaves bearing the shrouded corpse of the Athenian general away from the city that had sentenced him to ...”

“... relationship with the government of Henry VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to England, executed (by strangling before his body was ...”

“... Empire from the 15th century until it was annexed to Russia in 1783 by Catherine the Great. On 18 May 1944, more than a hundred and eighty thousand Tatars – mostly women, children and the elderly, because the younger men were at the front – were rounded up and deported to the Central Asian republics, mainly to Uzbekistan, accused of collaborating with the ...”

“... and the Everyday’. God help the students subjected to critique-al-pedagogy, whatever that may be. Say ‘convention’ in 1993, and most Americans will think of the naval rape-in at Tailhook – an orgy on a Roman scale. The excesses of MLA are not those of the flesh. Per capita there must be fewer sperm expended and less alcohol ingested than at any ...”

“... It may not be remembered in the current mammoth Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art, but in May 1939, just after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Frank Lloyd Wright paid a significant visit to England. His purpose was to deliver four lectures to the RIBA; lectures that he supplemented by showing 16 mm colour films of life at Taliesin West, the Arizona winter home of his peripatetic architectural family ...”

“... man of a certain age in a £500 overcoat. He will be accompanied by a toothsome brunette who may or may not be his undergraduate granddaughter up from the country to look at the Berninis. Or you may find yourself admiring the hair oil favoured by a man who is stepping out of an ...”

“... difference between gently suggesting, as universities always have, that attitudes acquired at home may need supplementation or correction, and telling undergraduates that they are sick and need treatment. It is one thing to treat undergraduates as fellow citizens who might be persuaded to think and act differently from their parents. It is quite another to ...”

“... with his rival from the radio, Chester Wilmot, Moorehead was an Australian by birth – and he may well have owed some of his success (not least with his employer, Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express) to a certain air of breezy informality. But there was also more than a touch of the grand seigneur about him – reflected in his automatic assumption ...”

“... back’), and the frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary life of San Francisco. But much of his poetry has also been laden down with ...”

“... then enforce. This totalitarian power could, it was presumed, be enlisted for liberal ends. It may be significant that the argument for the intimacy between language and power germinated in France during the last decade of de Gaulle, and took root in the United States during the Reagan years. For the twin properties of language that seemed to be ...”

“... the Parliament Bill a majority, he would have been excluded from the list by royal command. These may be ranked as small imprudences, however, and when they are set beside Lord Randolph Churchill’s relationship with Lord Rothschild no decline in standards is discernible. If ‘corruption’ is used in the narrow sense to denote the impingement of private ...”

“... asks what it is likely to contain and where, and digs up what he is looking for. In doing so he may cut corners, and he may get things completely wrong at first, but he will end up finding what he wants. To disagree with such an operator is taken as a sign of inferior intelligence, and probably jealousy as well. He is ...”

“... of the oddities was Hallucigenia, a small, spindly, spiky thing, yet with tubular organs, and what may or may not have been a head. The Cambrian ocean swarmed with sea-going arthropods: jointed-legged animals, now familiar as lobsters and lice, beetles and bees, spiders and scorpions. Their original discoverer C.D. Walcott ...”