“... or did it develop by stages from an original formless mass (epigenesis)? These questions may have been reformulated over the centuries, but they are still at the heart of the life sciences. The unfortunate error of timing, which made the questions harder to answer, was that biology developed as a science later than physics. Physics – above all ...”

“... years I have known myself to be on the right path.’ But there is a nagging sense that the Nazis may not have fully appreciated the importance of his thinking. Stuck in the positivistic biologism of the 19th century, they have not grasped that ‘for the last 15 years this change of the whole of being has been prepared, a change in which the movement must ...”

“... with keeping the water hot. Elder John has come, in the nick of time, to save their souls. But he may be too late.Over several days, as they travel by coach, rail and finally steamboat to New Bethany, Elder John teaches them the history and tenets of Shakerism, and wins everyone over – except for Harley, who, mindful that his dying father designated him ...”

“... his star’. The star from time to time becomes ‘my daemon’ or ‘my destiny’ and may be presumed to change places with his Muse or his Mistress. But these fanciful romanticisms barely mask the real power behind Powell’s throne: an unshakable confidence in his own abilities, born of application, observation, dedication and natural gifts. His ...”

“... a coffee-table adornment, successor to Igor and Vera Stravinsky and A Stravinsky Scrapbook – may look attractive, but its layout in wide double columns with extensive footnotes compounds the difficulty of reading. After certain page-turns one is confronted by four spacious blocks of print, packed with possibly inconsequential matter, and one’s eye ...”

“... rebuff of all – at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that ...”

“... with the devil’. In the years following there was a flood of accusations. When in May 1649 Sarah Edwards’s cow produced multicoloured milk, she and her husband were convinced that it had been bewitched by Hugh Parsons, the brickmaker whose wife, Mary, had been fined for accusing Marshfield. In February 1651 George Langton, a ...”

“... it is with the revolt in Egypt. The Mubarak regime – or some post-Mubarak continuation of it – may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all ...”

“... in defence of Tudor England are interesting, given their – sometimes exaggerated – support for Richard III against Henry VII in 1485 and the widespread support for the Pilgrimage of Grace, the massive northern revolt against Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536: dislike of Scotland trumped dislike of the Tudors. The recent coverage of the ...”

“... lectures, was blackballed from the 1924 expedition, while one member of the committee vetoed Richard Graham because he had been a conscientious objector. Mallory, to his credit, condoned neither decision, but once again the party was deprived of three of the finest climbers available, with Frank Smythe also being left off the list. Finch had not only ...”

“... like Murderers carried an epigraph from Don DeLillo’s Mao II: ‘News, darker and darker news, may be the only narrative people need, and the shapers of this narrative are authors in their own right. To a certain extent their world has become our world, a place of extreme anger and danger.’ Born Yesterday, his new novel, is an attempt to bring to life ...”

“... the US refuse to sell Taiwan the means of ‘deterrence’? There is money behind this, too, you may be sure. But it is the long-term consequence of a short-term policy of sowing dragon’s teeth. The Dame of Sark was never such a turbulent proxy. In the​ first week of March, China’s Finance Minister, Xiang Huaicheng, sent the new Bush Administration ...”

“... literary editor of the Spectator in 1958, he first commissioned reviews from him, adding: ‘I may have given the impression that Frank Kermode was new to the reading public when he started writing for the paper. That was not the case. He’d already made his name with his fine book, Romantic Image.’ Well, yes, he had in a sense made his name with that ...”

“... of this have occurred at New College of Florida, a small liberal arts institution in Sarasota.In May, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a preliminary report on the state of academic freedom in Florida, which concluded that ‘academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently ...”

“... inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of ...”