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“... The issue​ of evolutionary inevitability was brought sharply into focus by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale. The shale was formed 511 million years ago, in the period when animal life was first emerging ...”

“... man; he once signed a piece ‘Jaye Wolfstein’, a pseudonym intended to evoke both Jay Gatsby and his Jewish underworld associate Meyer Wolfsheim. (Jeremy claimed to be partly Jewish on his father’s side and liked to be called J or Jay.) Another character who fascinated him was Whitaker Chambers, the ...”

“... and Glasgow also enthral him. He is baffled by those like G.M. Trevelyan and, more recently, Peter Hall, who have found in the Victorian urban patchwork only muddle. Yet muddle there was, the reader is reminded, as idea locks horns with idea and style jostles with style. Take the marginal matter of style. The industrial cities were aware they amounted to ...”

“... contingency would guarantee that next time around it would not follow the same path. Stephen Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life, about the fantastic evolutionary dead-ends fossilised in Canada’s Burgess Shale, makes this point beautifully. We and other land vertebrates owe our eyes-above-nose-above-mouth features and our awkwardly intersecting ...”

“... products, and not in any general sense ‘better’ than even the lowliest bacterium. Stephen Jay Gould, in particular, has insisted that the anthropocentric Victorian perspective was fuelled more by theology than by sound biology. Like his pet theme, Spencer’s reputation, too, has been eclipsed. In the 1890s, he was well enough known to receive a ...”

“... to have the cool exactitude of his father’s studies of the private lives of sea anemones. Peter Abbs’s introduction to the current Penguin edition, first published in 1983, accepts the memoir as a faithful record of what happened: ‘As a documentary record we know, from other sources, that most of the facts are accurate.’ This is very much the ...”

“... When he says that he went to Crawford, Texas to interview George Bush, or that the retired general Jay Garner, briefly the head of Iraq’s post-invasion government, came over for breakfast at his place, he is emphasising his intimacy with those who talk to him. But in Plan of Attack he introduces himself in another way. He says that he regretted not pushing a ...”

“... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...”

“... Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he ...”

“... only sectarianism sufficed to explain the American rebels’ appalling disobedience. The loyalist Peter Oliver, writing in exile in London in 1781, detected the rebellion’s roots in the ‘Anarchy of Sentiment’ produced by the English Reformation, and stirred up by the doctrines peddled by the ‘black Regiment’ of Massachusetts clergy. The loyalist ...”

“... living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealised in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of 1960s Marvel comics in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by ...”

“... gave me the original impetus to consider the possibility of writing a novel’. In 1985, he told Jay McInerney: ‘I got really interested in the whole process, and thought, I wish I had written this book. I started writing stories about two years after she published her novel.’ He translated Sartre’s Huis Clos and Borges’s story ‘The Circular ...”

“... Michelle Obama said she had never heard talk like that and the right blogosphere dug up some ugly Jay Z lyrics and linked to Jay Z’s invitation to the Obama White House – there was no telling what might happen next. Post-election, the liberal argument veered away from Trump and turned to the important question of whom ...”

“... of three books about Mahler, has edited a new one, The Mahler Companion. Two other biographies, by Peter Franklin and Jonathan Carr, have recently appeared. And, of course, there are recordings – well over a thousand versions of twenty works. A Mahler Discography, published in 1995, is already thoroughly out of date. One starts to wonder: is there such a ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”