“... governments: so far even the rich haven’t been able to buy their way out of a traffic jam. This may change – we might yet see bus lanes redesignated as toll lanes. The contributors to Autopia grapple with these problems, but for the most part not very energetically. Allen Samuels tells us that the car ‘like all epochal icons . . . does not mean one ...”

“... in return. But so-called ‘reciprocal altruism’ isn’t authentically unselfish (as admitted by Robert Trivers, who coined the phrase) if the anticipated benefit is greater than the immediate cost. It’s therefore just as well for us all that altruism takes other forms too. People often bear costs not only in reproductive fitness but in material ...”

“... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...”

“... seeing it as a specific feature of Elizabethan-Renaissance men and women. Well, Forman may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the ...”

“... Spraggs writes, ‘that it has even been suggested that the astute professional malefactor may well have regarded clerical status as a useful qualification. A cleric could not be executed, though he might be jailed.’ The Folvilles’ plea that they were trying to right wrongs that could not be rectified otherwise was the standard justification of the ...”

“... her text – is the transformation of this primal rage in the work of art. ‘The motivation may be murderous,’ she asserts, ‘but the form must be absolutely strict and pure.’ Nowhere is this paradoxical combination of uncontrolled rage and self-conscious formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed ...”

“... of Mr Love in Mr Hayter, Miss Joy casts against type, and finds happiness. Changing your name may be what restores you to yourself. Miss Joy is truly joyful in the end, by virtue of becoming Mrs Hayter. There is a romantic novel to be glimpsed in this stanza: how, we might ask, did Miss Joy part company with Mr Love? Did she only choose him, but not marry ...”

“... phrase, is said to be delineated more clearly here than in earlier accounts. The claim may be conceded: but not all veils are drawn aside. In 1896 Churchill was ‘an intolerable nuisance’, according to Birkenhead, in his fruitless efforts to avoid the ‘tedious land of India’ and to scramble into a scene of military action and glory. We are ...”

“... and phrase-books in rare cases of need. Cameras are customary, but not essential. Movie-cameras may be used, but natives sometimes resent them. Travel may now be impossible, but travel-writing is, perhaps for that reason, much prized. To be a travel-writer, one must explore a far-flung, outlandish place and report the ...”

“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”

“... supposed that bicycles played such a part in the gold rushes in Australia and the Yukon? Why did Robert Service and his fellow poets not tell us about the rigours of the 400-mile cycle trail from Dawson City to Whitehorse? Or of the thousand-mile ride from Dawson City to Nome in Alaska undertaken by Edward Jesson, who narrowly avoided cycling on to a stretch ...”

“... one extreme to another, or trying to combine them in some paradoxical unity. For all I know, this may be one aspect of the ‘mysterious’ Russian soul. Since the Soviet Union closed its frontiers and put up its Iron Curtain, the behaviour of its citizens has become less and less predictable to Westerners. When the Western mind concludes that it’s ...”

“... Until her mother meets her in her mouth again        and makes use of what I could not And may appear on my plate next year in a             castrated form as a rasher; until, via a reference to the role of pigs in the Eleusinian mysteries, the transition is made to the visionary:              In the butcher’s window The ...”

“... generally takes into account the existence of parallel explanations or simultaneous pictures which may be equally valid: the fact that your model works does not make it the only possible model, nor does it ever cease to be a mere model. And secondly, one can’t help feeling that despite the brevity of the text there must be a much shorter and simpler way of ...”

“... public inebriation taboo. So it is in recent movies about Hollywood. Larry Levy, an executive in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), tells his rival Griffin Mill that ‘AA meetings are where the best deals are happening.’ The film follows Mill’s wandering but pin-sharp attention as he listens to increasingly bizarre ‘high concept’ story pitches in ...”