“... are of the Lords’. To be sure, even before the transmutation of the sub-working-class Mr Major into a Tory prime minister, to insist on the crippling effects of class distinction upon British society was the mark of a sociology excessively superficial even for that trade, of a naivety excessively American even for Americans. All sorts of statistics ...”

“... the new regime, Margaret’s Foreign Secretary. He is now the Secretary-General of Nato. Five major posts and still a failure? We should first examine Dr Cosgrave. I wrote earlier that the author had been both within and without the Conservative Party, first as a functionary employed in the Research Department of Conservative Central Office, and later, in ...”

“... The collection edited by Peter Quennell has some attractive photographs and two good essays, by John Bayley and Martin Amis. For the rest, there is a lot of laborious exegesis, which might have amused the recipient of the tribute, and a thought-provoking piece by Alfred Appel Jr, who knew Nabokov well and is steeped in his work. The thought provoked is that ...”

“... avenue of outrageousness in considering Hollywood films in the light, from time to time, of major works of thought’. But philosophy itself is outrageous, ‘inherently so’. ‘It seeks to disquiet the foundation of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better than itself.’ And nothing is more outrageous than the philosophy of the ...”

“... that a work is in sonata form. Indeed, I know nothing of music except being able to play the major and minor diatonic scales more or less accurately. What good that does me I have never understood. My musical education started quite abruptly when I went to Vienna in 1928 and attended concerts at least once a week during the two years I was ...”

“... was a pioneer of legal simplification, mixed polities and defence of civil liberties, and a major influence upon the American constitution. His views on penology were far more lenient and humane than those of Bentham himself; and his famous remark, ‘everything is now as it should be,’ is shown to have referred, not, as Bentham implied, to the ...”

“... Mexico. The pieces can be juggled almost at random. Still, the apparent evacuation of Syria was major news, and it hogged the headlines very satisfactorily. It was, he said on Twitter, ‘time for us to get out’ and let others ‘figure the situation out’. Believers might see this as a first step in Trump’s design – announced in the 2016 campaign ...”

“... myths, and is temperamentally a northern island or isthmus dweller. In that respect he’s like John Burnside, to whom he dedicated his best poem so far, ‘At Roane Head’ (LRB, 14 August 2008), in which there is not just a selkie at the bottom of the garden but there might be a selkie in the bedroom that could cuckold you, or make you kill your children ...”

“... give to the event. In this they differ, not only from some kinds of art-photograph, but from the major part of the tradition of photo-journalism. Christopher Killip’s photographs of the Isle of Man have been published by the Arts Council in a volume so beautifully printed that it is a work of craft to be admired in its own right. The pictures sit in the ...”

“... an evolutionary advantage. Schutt compares their emergence to ‘a farmer moving into town with a John Deere tractor while everyone else is using horse-drawn ploughs’. Pretty quickly – at least in evolutionary terms – fish jaws were bristling with teeth. Some long and thin fish even evolved an additional set of pharyngeal jaws inside their ...”

“... prisoners held by Israel. Over the first six weeks, the Israeli army would withdraw from major population centres and humanitarian aid would be allowed in. Air operations over the strip would be suspended for ten hours a day. During two subsequent phases the remaining captives would be exchanged, and the details of a permanent ceasefire would be ...”

“... love. The book begins with Mimi – whose husband is in India for work – hosting a party for Mrs John D. Rockefeller III, ‘president of the Museum of Modern Art’, in her tastefully furnished home. At the party she encounters Tom Potts, an assistant of Mrs Rockefeller’s, and becomes infatuated. Potts knows where to buy Hermès scarves and bags at a ...”

“... Emersonian connection’, ‘the Emersonian position’, ‘the Emersonian inclination’. A major aim of The Renewal of Literature is to establish what, or rather who, he has modified: among poets, Whitman, Frost and Stevens; among critics and theorists, John Hollander, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, George ...”

“... the skills she had developed in earlier work on coal. Subsequently, the director of the unit, John Randall, decided to hand over to her the project that Maurice Wilkins, aided by Raymond Gosling, a doctoral student, had begun – the structural analysis of DNA. Wilkins learned of this only when he returned from overseas to find that his project had been ...”

“... and Expressionism; in the readymade and in Dada’s exploitation of industrial raw materials (John Heartfield’s political photomontages would have been impossible without collage); and even Abstract Expressionism (as Clement Greenberg argued, the little pockets of ‘depth’ that pucker the surfaces of Cubist paintings presage the hills and crannies in ...”