“... the first time, linked with ancient texts on ‘uterine suffocation’, as we see most notably in Edward Jorden’s anti-Puritan tract, A briefe discourse of a disease called the suffocation of the Mother (1603). Here, hysteria is possession de-demonised with the help of Hippocrates’ gynaecological theories. If it is indeed true that hysteria comes into ...”

“... moved towards an enlightened pluralism – ‘I pursued … a slightly rebellious policy,’ he said in a radio interview that same year. Ogilvie describes such statements as ‘self-promotion’. ‘This is not to ascribe mendacity to Burchfield,’ she insists, yet ‘his claims for what he had done … simply were not true.’ She is not accusing him of ...”

“... behalf distant wars are ostensibly being fought? How normal are the normal lives these wars are said to be protecting? What feeling, if any, is there for those suffering human beings who are not our friends, relatives or fellow citizens? And how do the media stimulate or repress such feelings? After the photos of the fire-bombing of retreating Iraqi columns ...”

“... an English poet verges on the inaccurate so far as language is concerned. Ardis Butterfield once said on Radio 4’s In Our Time that he was in effect speaking French in English; and at a recent conference Elizabeth Archibald suggested that he was writing macaronics – those poems that combine two or more languages within a single verse form – only in a ...”

“... the ‘powerful grip that genes have recently come to have on the popular imagination’. Having said which, Keller acknowledges that gene talk has not yet outlived its usefulness and raises the question of what it is actually for. The ‘gene paradigm’, in its seductive simplicity, plays an important rhetorical role, genespeak having long become a ...”

“... of that scientifick difference for ever after . . . “Hierarchy?” offered I. “elysium,” said he.’ Gould sees his taxonomic duties as a worrying attempt ‘to re-create the natural world as a penal colony’. But he’s had worse offers, so he plays along. So much for Enlightenment Rationalism and the Progress of Science. All this continues for a ...”

“... as Trajan and Septimius Severus, who hailed from Spain and Africa. By the 18th century, however, Edward Gibbon and others had concluded that the problem was the Romans themselves, and their loss of faith in the enlightened civic values that had once made Rome great. A different response would be that the Roman Empire didn’t fall in the fifth century, or ...”

“... Crachami’s life story is on the left-hand page, the giant’s on the right. Both are said to be adapted from the display panel at the Hunterian Museum. It is difficult to know whether the glass and the dust, beautiful and haunting though they are, would work without the stories in the book. They are made to work together, but the point of the ...”

“... the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I say ‘poignancy’ because Hughes clearly cares a great deal about art, artists, politics, culture in general, Australia, Barcelona, religion, the American redemptive idea, Amish quiltmaking, and every other damn thing he’s written about. He ...”

“... became President on the death of Roosevelt in 1945, it was customary to laugh at him. It was said that the United States had exalted the common, ordinary man, and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as the small-town politician readily assumed the status of a world leader who, with unusual decisiveness, put ...”

“... magazines and saw photos of what our allies’ bombing planes had done to the city of Port Said at the head of the canal, I felt glad that Americans didn’t have to look at pictures like those as our work.’ Ellsberg returned to Harvard to write his doctoral dissertation – on a typically American subject, game theory – and then accepted a ...”

“... or isolated one from the other. They work in combination all the way through. Consider what is said, for example, about Bellow’s response to the death of his mother, in 1933, when he was 17 years old. In the second chapter this is described as a ‘lifelong mourning … a bondage doomed to play itself out in five marriages and a string of failed ...”

“... finished off with a varnish that has aged into a rich yellowy-brown: the total effect is sometimes said to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son ...”

“... an earlier volume, Labels, an account of a Mediterranean voyage, he did not write much about Port Said because, he said, his experiences there ‘approximate too nearly to English life’, but almost everything feels like a version of home. The cathedral at Málaga reminds him of the chapel at Hertford, his old Oxford ...”

“... much needed, since Annan’s own powers of expression were wooden to say the least. This pair, Edward Mortimer and Nader Mousavizadeh, came from the Financial Times and the New Republic respectively, two publications whose political profiles need little specification. Not surprisingly, Annan’s various pronouncements, applauded for their eloquence by ...”