“... waiting on the steps for the taxi that would take our speaker to the railway station. As the taxi drew up, he turned to me and said: ‘Votes of thanks are notoriously difficult to do and I think you did it superbly.’ This kind gesture to someone very unimportant, in circumstances where most people would have stayed chatting up their intellectual peers, was ...”

“... effect, only two theories of evolution have ever been put forward,’ writes John Maynard Smith, ‘one, originating with Lamarck ... the other originating with Darwin.’ Such reduction of the scientific corpus to patterns of mutual exclusivity doubtless tells us something about the strategy, if not the logic, of scientific corroboration. It is a ...”

“... when Margaret Simons, a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, drew attention to it in her essay, ‘The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir’. Beauvoir had offered Parshley no help; she was already hard at work on The Mandarins before he was half-way through his translation. Now Simons estimated that Parshley had cut at least ...”

“... I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of improbable adventures, among them (as if in compensation for the Puritan closure of the theatres) the ...”

“... his escapades in interior-decoration – he turned his apartment in the family’s London house in Smith Square into ‘The Silver Room’, furnishing it with silver-foil wall-coverings, silver-topped tables, silver satin curtains and a polar bearskin rug or two – and then because of his eye-catching appearance, his jewels and magenta lipstick and ...”

“... President Bush declared himself ‘disgusted’ by the beating. Commentators and cartoonists drew the analogy to a pack of jackals, pulling down and dismembering their prey with animal efficiency. These were professionals who used their night-sticks with an almost showy panache. Anything less ‘out of control’ (a much parroted phrase in press ...”

“... all right. ‘Oh yeah? You just said you were a writer! Now you tell me you’re reading.’ She drew out the last word in proper third-degree style. ‘So which is it, huh?’ She sat back hard in her seat and waited to see how I would wriggle out of that one. I lost the will to live at this point. I also sat back in my chair. I put my hands up. All I ...”

“... Newsweek and People.* It was optioned for the movies, recorded as an audiobook by Anna Deveare Smith, and added to the reading lists of many courses in African-American literature. In May 2003, Gates donated the manuscript, now valued at $350,000 – he bought it for $8500 – to Yale University, from which he graduated in 1973. There was just one ...”

“... James was persuaded to let his ‘sweet babies’ travel incognito to Madrid as Tom and Jack Smith, to bring home the Infanta Maria as Charles’s bride. It was a match that James and the count of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, had been negotiating carefully for years. Gondomar hoped that the marriage would benefit English Catholics and keep England ...”

“... use of self and anti-self. Previous critics have often taken too narrow a view of Gregory Smith’s emphasis on the tendency to combine opposites as a characteristic of distinctively Scottish writing. Buthlay is right to emphasise that this view of Scottish culture was important to MacDiarmid precisely because it suddenly made the Scottish cultural ...”

“... And here also was a good test, because Thatcher had attacked the two-party consensus on the Smith-Muzorewa deal, suggesting that if elected she would lift sanctions on Salisbury.At once we were in an argument. Of Joshua Nkomo I remember her saying: ‘I think Joshua is absolutely sweet.’ That was the least of our disagreements. On one point of ...”

“... the fray. Barrell’s final essay on the country cottage ideal shows the vision of privacy that drew them. ‘My soul is sick of public turmoil,’ Thelwall wrote to Coleridge in 1797, as he turned his back on LCS activism for ‘sweet retirement’ in the countryside. His first plan, to join Coleridge in his retreat at Nether Stowey, collapsed in the face ...”

“... in triumph. Conversely, the public hanging of John Platts outside Derby County Jail in April 1847 drew a crowd of twenty thousand – descendants of the ‘seething mob’ that played Shrove Tuesday football. When the FA was founded in 1863 it knew it was in direct competition for crowd support with public hangings, which ceased only after 1868. But the ...”

“... of a chance in Asia, where the most influential Western economist was Friedrich List, not Adam Smith. List had rejected Smith’s free trade theory as unsuitable for 19th-century conditions of rivalry and inequality between nation states. List had also spotted that laissez-faire economies favoured the trading interests ...”

“... even claimed to fear being enslaved themselves by imperial Great Britain, a claim that drew condign derision from Samuel Johnson, among others: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ Skinner and Philip Pettit identify in resistance to enslavement a mark of the ‘neo-Roman’ theory of republican ...”