“... 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 ...”

“... be, defamatory by a jury. To this uncertainty is added another: the cost. Who knows what damages may be awarded? Who knows at the start of a libel action what the lawyers’ bills will turn out to be? The Daily Mail defended a case against the Moonies. The paper had said that the church was in the habit of brainwashing its converts. When the first writ ...”

“... are very tightly-laced and you cut at your peril. A snatch of dialogue or narrative on page 20 may be a plant for a twist in the story on page 220. Wodehouse himself could cut his novels when occasion demanded – i.e. when the payment for a shorter version was big enough. Sometimes top-paying American magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, would ...”

“... entrée into the French King’s service. So leisurely a progress, though, suggests that it may be some time before the next volume or two can deal with the crucial periods when Choiseul was a minister. It is reasonable, then, to attempt to discern the merits of this book as it stands, a fragment of the torso. Clearly, it will have to be judged in due ...”

“... Major John Wesley Powell’s pioneer navigation of the Canyon in 1869, the less committed among us may reflect that these approved ways of seeing the place are extremely time-consuming, and require the setting aside of three or more days of one’s time, and the advance booking of guides, livestock or equipment. That ...”

“... be kept glowing if not with the secularist hot air which he and Cowling jointly despise. Cowling may well reply that the second and ‘larger’ work which he promises will set out all these matters. If so, it will have a hard time. At the end of this volume, at any rate, it is clear that Cowling’s thoughts, when they extract themselves from the activities ...”

“... conflict, and how relevant some of the ideas and attitudes involved still are. A word of warning may be in place. Professor Pagels often sets these Gospels, Secret Books, Epistles, Revelations (following her I shall refer to them collectively as Gospels) in parallel with the canonical Gospels – rightly, in a sense, since this is what the Gnostics ...”

“... pieces of legislation, such as the Berne Convention, do not even venture to define what ‘work’ may be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any ...”

“... pompous and deranged. Talking badly in this way also becomes a way of not really thinking: we may, for example, call Parliament a ‘soap opera’ simply because we are staggeringly uninterested in what is happening in our own seat of government. Calling something ‘operatic’ is our way of avoiding finding out about it. Opera sits at the centre of a ...”

“... of the arrogance of the strong and the shame of the weak, defeated Germans. The name of Hitler may not get much prominence in the book, the Nazi Party would figure only in the stories – some of them harrowing – of the ignorance of Allied efforts to de-Nazify school-teachers and censor school books, of arbitrary arrests of apparently innocent citizens ...”

“... situation, and the need to insist on the absurdity of the absurd. Horror and meaninglessness may be frequent, even banal, but we are lost if we treat them as normal, as all there is: if we abandon our anger at the affront they offer to reason. If our normality helps us to struggle, our rage may help us to survive. But ...”

“... escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the ...”

“... are busy but the sender is absent. These situations occur again and again in Kafka. And, though we may not like to admit it, elsewhere too. There are also some great not-quite parables in the selection: If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, that would have been allowed. The crows claim that a single crow could destroy ...”

“... what is’. Words cannot penetrate the intricate texture of things, however seductively they may evoke it. At the same time, language has its own textures and metamorphic properties, which may reflect the world but must not be confused with it. It is Peck’s least Poundian characteristic that provides the key to his ...”

“... a signal contribution to our understanding of how science works and what it achieves. Scientists may be good at running science, but nobody understands very well how it works. Our best models of how they test their theories have absurd consequences – the idea, for example, that every observation is evidence for every theory – and our accounts of where ...”