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“... and are thought to override explanations from inside a religious point of view. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s book defends a contrasting, pluralistic conception, according to which multiple different forms of understanding of religion – as of other human phenomena – are all legitimate, and compatible with one another. This ecumenical conclusion is ...”

“... weapon was never discovered, but a ballistics expert testified that it had most likely been a 9mm Smith & Wesson. Maharaj’s gun collection had included a 9mm Smith & Wesson though he claimed it had been stolen from him shortly before the murders. The star witness for the prosecution was Neville Butler, a reporter on the ...”

“... of their opponents. Apparently, however, they do not. Which brings us, at last, to John Maynard Smith. It was in an attempt, ten years ago, to show how the theory of individual selfishness could explain the restrained nature of animal contests that he introduced game theory to evolutionary biology. The explanation so perfectly illustrates his method, being ...”

“... guests had their heels checked for explosives – this was well before the ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid tried to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The Chadian state used to be – in the words of the American anthropologist Janet Roitman – a ‘garrison-entrepôt’: a guarded storage facility for hoarders in one of the ...”

“... Tony’s clothes aroused considerable excitement, impeccably turned out as he was in That Paul Smith Shirt with the naked woman on the cuffs. According to the Guardian, the PM’s soft-porn chemise was a gift from Cherie Booth QC; but who knows? A year or two ago Smith was given a knighthood, and he sits alongside such ...”

“... she had with Kay Dick in November 1970 (the best source for the flavour of her speech), Stevie Smith remarked: I’m straightforward but I’m not simple ... In some ways I’m romantic but my basic root is profoundly sensible – profoundly sensible. About everything. There is a balance; I am aware of a balance. I know the sort of things that can knock ...”

“... All three of Ali Smith’s novels are set in holiday places. In Like (1997), Amy Shone and her daughter Kate live on a caravan site in Scotland; the characters of Hotel World (2001) are guests and workers at the Global Hotel in an unnamed city; in The Accidental, the new book, the Smart family are spending their summer in a mock-Tudor holiday house near the Norfolk Broads ...”

“... poets like Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell. Even the professors he saw most of – Van Doren, Richard Blackmur – published poems and were reckoned to be mildly cranky. Van Doren, for instance, would later advise Berryman that ‘scholarship’ was fit only ‘for those with shovels, whereas you’re a man of the pen, the wind, the flying horse, the ...”

“... the virtual extinction of original English music for more than a hundred years’. Richard Luckett will have no truck with cultural snobbery of this sort, even if he fastidiously forgets ‘Hallelujah’ when he writes that in ‘For now is Christ risen’ Christ is ‘named for the first time in Messiah’. His quirky, learned, acerbic book ...”

“... from, if not a betrayal of, his poetic calling. Now his reputation is changing again. Nigel Smith’s biography belongs to a series of early 21st-century publications which, aided by other recent scholarship, have brought the verse-writer and the prose-writer together. In 2003 there appeared fresh versions of Marvell’s writings: ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of ...”

“... and continued with the Bible, before going on to Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith and so on. There was, it seemed to me, little sign of contemporary civilisation. Fully occupied with delivering twice-weekly lectures on Europe from 1870 to 1919 and a weekly graduate class on imperial Germany, I considered myself fortunate that I didn’t ...”

“... career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton ...”

“... about the collapse of the tsarist autocracy nor even of the Provisional Government,’ Stephen Smith writes, in his sober, well-researched and comprehensive history. Sean McMeekin seconds this, affirming that ‘the events of 1917 were filled with might-have-beens and missed chances’ while at the same time tipping his hat to show who the intellectual ...”