“... these questions as reductive. ‘Put me on your census now,’ he urges the man, ‘because I may not be here when the next census comes around.’Since the 1960s, when racial statistics became important for monitoring and enforcing civil rights legislation, estimates of differential undercounts (and strenuous follow-ups and statistical ...”

“... and willingness to challenge convention. Darwin’s interest in evolution and inheritance may also have been influenced by his family’s health troubles. He married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and wondered whether his children had suffered the consequences. In Josiah’s own generation, too, health was a constant concern. His wife, Sarah, was ...”

“... the same sentiment was behind the ‘deport first, appeal later’ policy introduced by Theresa May when she was home secretary (visa overstayers face ‘enforced returns’; ‘deportation’ is reserved for criminals).I also worked on the case of RN, a Jamaican national whose family had moved to the UK in 2001, when he was three. A deportation order was ...”

“... will be worth attending to this tale: the authorial voice is steady and confident. English fiction may be largely at the mercy of moonlighting journalists (auditioning for more copy in the Sundays), but the American Novel, line-edited until it shines, is safely in the hands of the Literature Professors, who are happy to remain on tenure while their raids carry ...”

“... the wine?’Molly said with authority, ‘You’ll want white for your soup. White burgundy.’‘May I suggest the Montrachet?’ The waiter tapped a numbered item on the wine list.‘Super,’ Molly said. ‘And I think a Bordeaux with my pheasant. This Margaux’ – she pointed. ‘We can share. Though you might want a Côtes du Rhône with your main ...”

“... in his name. Marxism is not Karl Marx, it is true, any more than Darwinism is Charles Darwin. You may not be astonished by this thought. ‘What neither his enemies nor his disciples are willing to acknowledge is the most obvious yet startling of all his qualities: that this mythical ogre and saint was a human being.’ Perhaps such an admission is so ...”

“... think, though, that Stoppard has particularly been the victim of tall-poppy syndrome. Vilification may still be considered the quickest way for any reviewer to make a name, but theatre critics, not being in the same line of business as those they are reviewing, don’t suffer from the routine jealousy of those book reviewers inclined to behave as if an author ...”

“... on ‘Value Systems, Social Structure and Race Relations in the British Isles’ in 1954.In May 1948, the Trinidadian-American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox published Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, a critique of the use of ‘caste’ by white academics, particularly Lloyd Warner and Gunnar Myrdal, whose study of race relations, An ...”

“... this argument in his celebrated manifesto ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, which appeared in the May 1962 issue of New Worlds, and over the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ...”

“... letters survive, and Robinson analyses them at length, using them to suggest that Bodichon may have had a horror of sex. Hirsch more plausibly argues that her concern was that the ‘master passion’ of sexual desire, which she clearly recognised in herself, might overcome her reason. Chapman was eventually dispatched, but his antics surely helped to ...”

“... This struck me as worth writing about, too, but I didn’t. I just nodded and took the room.In May, the Black Lives Matter protests began. Some were in towns in eastern Kentucky. A friend had mentioned a man called Bill Turner to me, and I saw he had written something for a website called the Daily Yonder about his ‘unbridled joy’ on seeing ‘crowds ...”

“... Balzac’s work, and many of the generalisations we make about him won’t easily apply to it. It may be his most Romantic book: more lyrical, subtler and more autobiographical than most of the Comédie humaine. It is much less concerned with chronicling society or asserting the determining effect of economics and environment. The novel is structured as a ...”

“... into a sectarian conflict. By the spring of 1860, Mount Lebanon had erupted into civil war. In May, Druze fighters attacked several Maronite strongholds, burning villages and killing Christians in Hasbayya, Zahleh and Dayr al-Qamar. More than a hundred thousand Christians were left homeless. In one of his letters to Johnson, Mishaqa reported that ‘rivers ...”

“... feelings in their faces.’ Hitchcock’s films are informed by the sense that pleasant faces may conceal murderous feelings. Respectable appearances repeatedly dissolve into extraordinary menace. Benign professors whip out guns, as do nuns and housekeepers. Being afraid that friendly looks might fade to an ominous black stare isn’t, of course, an ...”

“... his walk back from the letterbox he looked at the dog again, and the dog stared back, adding: It may be hot but I’m still lying on this car. Before opening the garden door he turned for a final glance.     – What did it do? I urged him, because he was laughing quietly and richly to himself.     It lifted its head from its paws and straightened ...”