“... naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White – had become something quite different from the activity of the professional scientist. In his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage dismissed the amateur tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious ...”

“... paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been ...”

“... which was festering in a way that was obvious even to the US officials who visited. When Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative, and Vice President Joe Biden met Karzai they immediately saw the problem. In 2009, Holbrooke and Karzai tried to rig the upcoming elections in different directions. In the resulting mess Karzai remained in ...”

“... leg-ribbons, his high-heeled shoes, ‘fitted with greatest possible exactitude’, his ‘long white tunic’ and ‘dark-brown Circassian coat’. Byron’s is not the only ghost to be detected here: the cold hearts of his precursors Lovelace and Laclos’s Valmont are evident in Pechorin, who has succeeded in attracting a certain princess. ‘I’ll ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield standing in a London garden, with a line of washing hanging behind them like a white flag of truce or surrender); Lawrence’s severed friendship with Bertrand Russell; the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915; the dim years (1916-17) in Cornwall, when the Lawrences were being investigated by government authorities as possible German ...”

“... a tense, silent moment in a comedy, made even more tense by the sharp contrasts between crisp white linen and black velvet, and by a dramatic diagonal of light on the plain wall behind them, which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani ...”

“... the role of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. I happened to be in Delhi in 1982 soon after the release of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. One sunny winter afternoon, a group of us were tormenting an Indian co-producer of the film, accusing him of selling out to Hollywood and all that. After several minutes he turned on us: ‘The film was not made for people like ...”

“... The chapters by Susan Watkins (on Nato and Russia), Régis Debray (on Nato and France) and Richard Seymour (on Nato and the UK) demonstrate its depth. But this is marginal dissent all the same. The alliance’s official motto – ‘animus in consulendo liber’, ‘in discussion a free mind’ – is almost unknown. But since Russia’s invasion of ...”

“... source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the English ...”

“... in a prose that looked decidedly non-experimental – pure, classical, like something carved from white marble.’ Even so, a host of critics (mostly male) simply missed the point. Among other things, the decidedly odd and unsexy ‘Miss Cather’ was deemed to be insufficiently engaged with Big Social Issues. During the Depression she came under violent ...”

“... greater difficulty in admitting that we knew all along that it was happening. By 1 August 2002, White House lawyers were itemising techniques that would not in their view constitute torture under the Federal Torture Act, including forced standing, hooding, starvation and thirst, sleep deprivation, the ‘frog crouch’, the Israeli shabeh and extreme ...”

“... only make men and women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.’ He is finding fault with himself on grounds Shelley provided: ‘The One remains, the many change and pass;/Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;/Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the ...”

“... best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the ...”

“... more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth ...”

“... each other. Birt’s first innovation was ‘producer choice’ (recommended by a Major government White Paper in 1992), which required BBC resource departments to charge producers the ‘real’ costs of their services, giving producers the complementary right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where ...”