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“... example of the heights to which his’ – Jones’s – ‘style can rise’. Jones did the noble thing and wrote in sheepishly to point out that part of the quoted paragraph was Darwin. Its awkward Jones-cum-Darwin aspects notwithstanding, Almost like a Whale provides a fine overview of modern evolutionary biology. Even so, I wish that Jones had ...”

“... he had fallen in love with Helen, the daughter of his mentor the journalist James Ashcroft Noble. Thomas’s devotion to Helen was fuelled by his wish for independence from his family, and by his hopes of cutting a dash with his contemporaries, but it rapidly brought him responsibilities of a more constricting kind. Although he and Helen campaigned for ...”

“... another law for the strong; one law for those opposing us, another for those allied with us’ – noble sentiments that had not stayed Eisenhower’s hand when dealing with matters in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam and elsewhere. With the Kremlin blustering about rocket attacks – ‘the Arabs will not stand alone,’ Khrushchev vowed – the world seemed to be ...”

“... to people who would never ordinarily read a poem’. Naturally, one can see the point of this noble effort, and I hereby propose three cheers for the non-elitists. Goodwin’s new book, Poems to Last a Lifetime, has chapter headings like ‘Journey of Life’, ‘Missing You’, ‘Commitment Problems’, ‘Getting Older’ and ‘Memories’, each of ...”

“... vigour that I made my way to the Jobcentre a few days on, where they hired me themselves, in the noble position of clerical assistant. I was to sit at the front desk, giving out information to ex-miners and steel-workers, to people looking for any sort of job. They were men in their forties and fifties, girls and boys like me just out of school, women ...”

“... supposed to have the life she has had. Her mother and father wanted her to marry somebody from a noble family. ‘It was like a Henry James novel set in Hollywood,’ Stein writes. But the 1950s showed a lot of people, Stein included, how to ask questions that had never been asked before. And that became something of a programme in that next decade, when a ...”

“... Can any profession be more altruistic and noble than medicine? It comes as rather a scandalous suggestion that doctors may themselves be sick. Not just overworked and exhausted, and statistically liable to alcoholism, drug-dependence and suicide: but actually deficient in their psychological make-up. This shocking possibility has recently been floated by Glin Bennet, who argues that medicine holds special attractions for those suffering from flawed personalities ...”

“... the charge’ makes the cavalrymen of the Light Brigade into Arthurian heroes; ‘Noble Six Hundred’ places them in the tradition of the three hundred Spartans commemorated in Simonides’ epigram on Thermopylae. For Sir Henry Newbolt there is no difference between the words of the school cricket captain with ‘Ten to make and the match to ...”

“... came to mind some weeks ago when most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph. It came to be widely accepted that this trial represented a clash between an Old Britain personified by Mr Worsthorne and a New Britain exemplified by the man Private Eye calls ...”

“... of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of the country he is altogether incapable of judging.’ Anyone who has dined recently with ...”

“... at something he finds hard to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey tell the story of the century’s dealings with the mad make it clear that Morison’s haunted expression could have been that of any of the seven ‘mad-doctors’ described here. The first of them was born ...”

“... our British heroines was saying just that, and her henchfolk were proving her right, while I read Andrew Davies’s Dirty Faxes, a collection of short stories. This conjunction of blue politics and black fiction made such an impression on me as to bring frequently to mind the King of Brobdingnag’s strictures on the character of the British: ‘I cannot but ...”

“... I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... story begins. A similar atmosphere hangs over Eeeee Eee Eeee. It’s the story, such as it is, of Andrew, recently graduated from college in New York and living again with his parents in Florida, delivering pizzas for Domino’s. He hangs out with his friends, thinking about his time in New York and his ex-girlfriend there. Occasionally a dolphin or a bear or ...”

“... and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe sticks out of his sock. The Guardian compilation reminds readers how high expectations were when Brown took over. ‘Master ...”