“... themselves were historical beings? The burial practices of Homo neanderthalensis suggest that they may have done so, but even this species shows an unerring technological repetitiveness, making essentially the same types of stone tool year after year for millennia, with no more than minor variations on a limited number of technological themes. Indeed, many ...”

“... When you have bid your servant once adieu. Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be, nor your affairs suppose, But like a sad slave sit and think of naught Save where you are how happy you make those. So true a fool is love, that in your will, Though you do anything, he thinks no ill. Shakespeare wrote at moments more richly and deeply ...”

“... contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be based on a realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the object.’ Love and hate – a too simple vocabulary, and so never quite the right names – are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; they are ...”

“... Brutus’ name from his speech entirely’, Cicero says, before going on to hint that the omission may have had something to do with the fact that Brutus’ mother, Servilia, was sleeping with Caesar. Their relationship led to the rumour (which can’t be true) that Brutus was Caesar’s illegitimate son. Caesar​ began his campaigns in Gaul the following ...”

“... wisdom implied in that absurdity was, of course, that no generation can comprehend how history may characterise major events that occur during its lifetime. While one cannot place the current scene in the context of what may occur in the next few years, however, there is still a widespread feeling – often encysted in ...”

“... ideas as Wittgenstein’s of language games and Austin’s of how to do things with words. But, it may be felt, Phillips’s use, for example, of the idea of words ‘doing something’, as in ‘Symptoms’, the second essay in Terrors and Experts, is not Austin’s, as when we find there: ‘It is always worth wondering, as a prelude to a case-presentation ...”

“... Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get ...”

“... as significant as evidence gets. But, like a string of previous convictions, it can mislead. It may have been made in fear or distress in order to put an end to an ordeal; it may have come from a compulsive confessor; it may have been made in the hope of securing bail or facing a ...”

“... So far, I may have given more expression of preference than solid argument. I need now to list the main details throughout the book which prepare the reader for Stephen to accept the Bloom Offer. There is at once a rather quaint obstacle. Most readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer ...”

“... weary man-of-the-world at 17, nothing less thrilling than Clovis Sangrail would do. In our envy we may have wondered sometimes if it were not much easier to be funny with tigers than with collar-studs; if Saki’s careless cruelty, that strange boyish insensitiveness of his, did not give him an unfair start in the pursuit of laughter. It ...”

“... take me long to work out that it was indeed that Muhammad Ali. The two men had met in Ghana in May 1964. Looking at the photo of Nkrumah on the page facing the dedication I could now make out the trace of something that had been signed on top of it. ‘Muhammad Ali/World Champ/1964’. The puzzle was how the book had ended up in the bookseller’s ...”

“... Etymology doesn’t help us much here. Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different ...”

“... miners, dock workers, sports promoters and travelling showmen. Mary Collier, a washerwoman poet, may or may not have been a historical person, but the verse epistle published under her name is one of a series of 18th-century poems that describe working-class life and labour in a classicising form. Dic Aberdaron, an ...”

“... IDF. But they are free to call that arrangement a Palestinian state. As to Trump’s thinking, he may well have intended to repeal America’s commitment to a two-state solution, although his ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, has stated categorically that there was no such intention. When Trump said that he would be as happy with a one-state agreement as ...”

“... Biologists​  love abbreviations, but we often use them clumsily. What may sound like catchy acronyms to one group of researchers are tiresome jargon to colleagues in related fields. Fruit fly geneticists have taken whimsy to absurdity: MAD stands for ‘Mothers Against Decapentaplegic’. The ‘decapentaplegic’ bit comes from a mutant fly that doesn’t correctly form fifteen (deca-penta) important structures that go on to become legs, wings, antennae etc ...”