“... he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that you ‘are not the principal character’, but you can’t help sounding like it when you use such a locution as ‘when I and Sean White took him to Dublin Castle’. After you ... Likewise the author of Purity of Diction in English ...”

“... brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do so. C. P. Snow, however, knew that Philip would write this book ‘and welcomed it; his only stipulation was that it should not be published in his lifetime.’ There was ten years’ difference between the two ...”

“... direct their helpful behaviour towards relatives, then the genes associated with altruism may spread, because they are present in the beneficiaries and transmitted to their offspring; or if today’s altruist is tomorrow’s recipient, the present loss may be made up with interest. Models of kin selection and ...”

“... On the night of 10 May 1996, 19 climbers were stranded in a blinding storm on the upper flanks of Mount Everest. The temperature dropped to −100° Fahrenheit. Whipped up by fierce winds, spindrift blasted the mountainside on which envelopes of thick cloud had descended. Visibility was reduced to a few feet. The following day, eight climbers were dead ...”

“... Many celebrations were planned and held, not only in Philadelphia, where the framers had met from May to September in 1787, but in many American cities, large and small. The point of these ceremonial events was not only to recall a moment in the nation’s past but also to educate the public about the meaning and value of the Constitution. None of these ...”

“... sometimes emotionally urgent style which invites us to get close to what these long dead teachers may have had at heart. Hellenistic philosophy is often called ‘post-Aristotelian’ philosophy, and Nussbaum takes Aristotle (who died a year after Alexander) as the starting-point, setting out his ethical outlook as a kind of bench-mark. She claims for him, as ...”

“... eructation to be heard in the by now extensive library of Oulipian production, the items of which may have their makers’ names attached to them but are without exception scrupulously unrevealing of any psychic quiddity. The Oulipo’s few, hospitable rules, moreover, were drawn up so as to make it clear from the start that this literary grouping would be ...”

“... simultaneously infect a single cell. It has even been suggested that new coronavirus strains may have arisen by incorporating RNA from their animal hosts or from other RNA viruses such as influenza. High levels of recombination and mutation are both good news and bad. They help the virus to evolve fast. Pessimists say, therefore, that Sars could rapidly ...”

“... the verge of collapse. If it has any value at all, then it is only as a functional entity, which may not be localisable within a chromosome. But once genes are redefined in this way, it is meaningless to consider them independently from the metabolic processes that play a critical role in determining their function. Third, that the process of development by ...”

“... it represents. Of the three, the map might appear to be the odd one out: the mirror and the photo may be two-dimensional illusions of a three-dimensional reality, and both are notoriously prone to distortion, but they operate by optical mechanisms that apparently guarantee a slavish fidelity to what can be seen. The map, in contrast, must ...”

“... President? (That is, if it did elect him: we still don’t know what happened in Florida, and we may never really know.) Back then, even if you despised Reagan for his politics, you had to acknowledge his charisma, or at least that others felt its sway. It’s the same with Clinton today: even if you loathe him for his duplicity, you have to admit his ...”

“... who died on the mountain in 1924, close to the summit, which he and his companion, Andrew Irvine, may or may not have reached. Since then there has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the ...”

“... writing the lives of psychoanalysts should be better at this than most. But there are those who may doubt the propriety of their revelations and investigations. Even when the subject is a fairly ordinary mortal they feel that he or she has a right to some posthumous privacy; and the psychoanalytical profession would presumably claim to be at least as ...”

“... Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Mme d’Eon etc. These, and many more may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes as well as heroines, exceptional to general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable creatures. The point was political, but its immediate target was the late 18th-century literary ...”

“... to diminish their occurrence (the accounts always preach to the converted and incite the rest); we may be better placed now than ever before to wonder whether there’s any useful instruction to be had from such books. Whether, that is to say, they haven’t become the fiction of choice for contemporary armchair philosophers, telling us very little about ...”