“... matter. Woman is Animal. Yet, as Warner points out, Woman functions in the myths as the animal self more effectively where there is a belief in the value of the ‘civilised’. When ‘nature’ is seen as aggression, and aggression is to be highly valued – in the dog-eat-dog world of the Stock Exchange and in ...”

“... vivid book, New York Cops Talk Back: A Study of a Beleaguered Minority.1 They used to derive their self-esteem from the belief that they were the guardians of society, the embodiment of its values: they represented right. The police force, moreover, used to be a means by which poor people could climb the social ladder. But now they feel they are no longer ...”

“... action: but it will not explain the personal commitment. Given Adam Smith’s insistence that self-love was a more influential mechanism of social betterment than benevolence, and his scepticism about the probity of officials or the likelihood of a man working as hard for the public as he would for himself, the conscientiousness with which he did his work ...”

“... comes to terms with one’s past.’ How very American, I thought: the quest for roots; self-measurement against the promise of the past; the reunion as a personal and collective stock-taking. A painful business. Meanwhile, however, Tony was persuading me. As a student of American culture, who had had a particular college experience in the United ...”

“... and Ireland in 1800, the north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, became the most self-consciously British region of the United Kingdom. By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls ...”

“... The grandson of an Anglesey sheep farmer, Jones was never exactly poor: his father was a real self-made man, a brilliant mathematician who rose from charity school in Llanfechell to become vice-president of the Royal Society (introducing ‘pi’ in its modern meaning along the way). But he died before his son’s third birthday, and Jones started life ...”

“... to circumnavigating the Earth 120 times.It isn’t known whether the albatross already belonged to Robert Edmond Grant when he started to put together his collection in 1827. Grant arrived in London that year from Edinburgh, where he had taught Charles Darwin and studied marine invertebrates with him in the Firth of Forth. All 12 of Grant’s brothers joined ...”

“... King School in Akron, Ohio, in June 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous has grown into the largest secular self-help organisation in the Western world. With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church ...”

“... its maximum gestural impact.When he slipped away from England and his first wife in 1898, for a self-appointed exile in Dieppe, Paris and Venice, Sickert left behind a reputation as foremost apostle to the ‘genius’, he whose ‘lightest utterance is inspired’, the ‘immortal’, London’s ‘living Old Master’. Whistler was his first point of ...”

“... writers and critics came and went. Literature was a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel ...”

“... sympathy. Powered by them, he sets out to overcome ‘law’ in the bad old sense – formalistic, self-referential, supposedly autonomous law of the sort his generation and mine were taught at law school and read in the judgments of a judicial generation which has now passed on. This is a task which today is a great deal easier than overcoming sex, because ...”

“... as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1892. William Morrison’s dirigible boasted a four-horsepower ...”

“... remained one of Evelyn’s friends for most of his life. He also enjoyed what was called, after Robert Boyle had popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that ...”

“... present-day relevance of their subject. That history shapes us and our world ought to appear so self-evident as to set it above tie-ins with newspaper headlines. Yet history never repeats itself exactly; and while ‘lessons can be learned’ from the past, one can always conjure a multitude of pasts to choose from. Presents, too. A basic classroom lesson ...”

“... as though what’s going on out there were more interesting to her than the rigmarole in the car. Robert Siodmak, the director, told her what to do in minute detail, forcing her to play down her performance. Whoever deserves the credit, the result is a little piece of perfection, a rare instance of downbeat, off-guard grace. Gardner was never so good ...”