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“... age. Anachronism is one of the main means by which Huxley is to be snatched from his age. He has long been known as Darwin’s bulldog – a venerable English kind of hound, known to Shakespeare. Calling him Darwin’s Rottweiler (a breed which did not exist in the 19th century and which in England did not become notorious for its savagery until the ...”

“... saying sadly: Heu michi quia sterilem duxi vitam iuvenilem. But her view is one of the great, long-lasting English fallacies, a fine example of post hoc propter hoc. Because for many centuries sharp-witted boys (but not girls) were picked out and taught Latin, it was observed that sharp-wittedness and Latin went together, and concluded that learning Latin ...”

“... and since she produced these stories rather easily, she came to think of the New Yorker, for a long time an indispensable financial support, as a generous old admirer whom she could please fairly easily when she needed to. In addition to the stories and novels she wrote poetry, and a biography of T.H. White. She also translated Proust’s Contre ...”

“... soon to be Owen’s junior colleague as lecturer at the School of Mines, was about to begin, long before the Darwinian controversy, what looks suspiciously like a systematic campaign of detraction, designed to establish his own reputation on the ruin of Owen’s, which was to reach its celebrated climax a decade later. In fact, ten years on, in ...”

“... you may as well take this one as any other, though it’s hard to do any worthwhile thinking so long as you burden yourself with such a thing. I infer from Inglis’s reference to ‘the chic notation of the Parisian deconstructionists’ and from a footnote citing Jacques Derrida’s Grammatology that radical earnestness is what he claims for the ...”

“... group stood the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, who had, according to Dr French, a long-range strategy of his own. Kitchener was an Imperial soldier-statesman who saw no point in defeating Germany only to restore the power of Britain’s traditional rivals – France, and, especially Russia, who might, victorious in Europe, turn her attention ...”

“... paintings were prejudiced in their favour. Besides, the Ireland that appears in those paintings is long gone, and while few of us cry out for its recovery, we are touched by its residual signs. Most of the famous paintings were done between the turn of the century and, say, 1950: these include Memory Harbour, The County of Mayo, The Priest, The Cake Cart at ...”

“... Tales filtered back from Crusaders and distant travellers of a giant herbivore with a nose so long and pliable that it could pick up men and seat them on its back, and of an armour-plated carnivore that lurked in water and could be mistaken by the unwary for a log of wood. These were as improbable – and therefore as possible – as a white horse with a ...”

“... on the plants of the Antarctic, New Zealand and Tasmania. Taking a break from his travels only long enough to get engaged (prudently, to the daughter of the Cambridge professor of botany), he put off marriage in favour of another epic voyage, this time to the Himalayas. His father got him a government commission of £400 a year – though Joseph later ...”

“... had the fox brought? ‘It was a nest of pink newborn mice – all he had found to bring home in a long day’s hunting.’ Rifles and ammunition were never far from hand. ‘We were raised to hunt,’ he says. Indeed, before Camusfeàrna, Maxwell had already had a short-lived and ruinous career running a basking-shark fishery. Raised to hunt, but observant ...”

“... undying. ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ (Kipling, 1911) will last as long as the war between the sexes, and ‘It takes two to tango’ (it took two, Hoffman and Manning, 1952) will last as long as the old dance. This dictionary reminds us not only that many a proverb coined its age-old wisdom ...”

“... his reactions. Other readers have recognised The Origin as, in Darwin’s own words, ‘one long argument’, brilliantly, if subtly, urged from the start. Mrs Beer also notes that Chapter One opens with the words ‘When we look ...’, a telling observation tellingly developed, and one of many in this book (another is that the word ‘fact’ is ...”

“... Before we get to the gas masks left behind, the book itself is an object. The hard cover and the long, regimented columns – ‘Date Found’, ‘Where Found’, ‘Article’, ‘Description’, ‘Name, Marks, Initials, Addresses, Labels’, ‘By Whom Found’, ‘How Disposed Of’, as well as the handwriting itself – speak of a world before virtual ...”

“... moral, philosophic, above all sexual. From his early days at Eton Keynes became involved in a long series of more or less serious affairs with male contemporaries. At King’s, and as a member of the Cambridge Apostles, homosexuality became for Keynes not merely a private diversion or expression of emotion but a whole way of life, almost a ...”

“... lack of any eye-catching interpretative or polemical claims. It is more than five hundred pages long, published by HMSO as part of the official history of the home front during the Second World War, and it addresses, with unyielding attention to detail, such topics as the exact division of administrative responsibilities for the provision of ambulance and ...”