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“... An energetic thinker with some original ideas may understandably rebel against the oppressive demand to get it right, especially when the demand comes, as it often does, from cautious and conventional colleagues. In responsible subjects such as the natural sciences, such people rebel against the demand only at their peril – or rather, their ideas will succeed only if the demand is, in the end, obeyed, and the colleagues turn out merely to have been too cautious ...”

“... famous novel Memoirs of a Midget, glances at Borges and goes on to the possibility that de la Mare may be the only English Surrealist, but one with a manner that has what she calls the ‘sheen’ of the Pre-Raphaelites. This ‘sheen’ on his best prose is of course protective and is intended to give the false sense of safety in which we can play with ...”

“... and the embarrassment the Zorzas’ book is likely to rouse in those who cannot close with it may make them feel it richer to respond to death with something more like anger than resignation. The counter-irritant that came into my mind as I read was Hal Summers’s requiem for his cat: he would not pretend That what came was a friend But met it in pure ...”

“... at 1.30 – one o’clock Central Time in Adelaide. It’s early days in Hobart Town, and Maggie May has been transported (not such fun as it sounds, poor lass) to toil upon Van Diemen’s cruel shore. It’s 1830 or thereabouts (1800 in Adelaide? No, no, this is going too far as she might have said herself at the time.) The time is three o’clock, etc. The ...”

“... per cent of all loving was received by just 11 per cent of the population.) At first, the metrics may be a little inexact, but they can be improved: for example, instead of simply recording the number of instances of ‘I love you,’ LovStatPlus will distinguish when it is said sincerely from when it has been prompted or said as part of an attempt to have ...”

“... in environmental disputes, quite apart from what we say on behalf of the humans involved (who may or may not have an interest in letting the trees live). Philosophers are more cautious about rights-talk. Rights, they say, are not to be invoked lightly, and are certainly not to be attributed on every occasion when some ...”

“... than the present one. Jury-vetting is not the same thing as jury-packing, although the first may prepare for the second. Whether packing does or could take place in contemporary English practice is a matter remarkably obscure. The Police may properly inspect the panel against their records, in order to remove ...”

“... story of Cinderella). I would add (following Carlo Ginzburg) that the idea of the identifying foot may also be linked with the earliest morphologies, the footprints of animals followed by prehistoric hunters – a habit enshrined in Aristotle’s, and our, classification of animals as quadrupeds, bipeds, six-legged insects etc; and that the foot is often the ...”

“... introduced it into an explanation that proposes to do without it.’ Her own solution, which she may perhaps owe to Wittgenstein, consists in subordinating what we call knowledge of the past to grammatical training in the use of the past tense. I find this unacceptable in that it runs into a dilemma: if ‘the past tense’ is construed ...”

“... despised. His paintings were ‘monuments of an irrelevant virtue’ which showed how ‘patience may be misused’ (Walter Armstrong, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1904). He was no longer avidly collected: there was not a single panel by Dou in the exhibition held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909 of 150 Dutch paintings from the ...”

“... of evolutionary progress, and it is possible that the profundity of some of the elements may make us less conscious of the dubious nature of others. In particular, Darwin’s general idea of progress – on which his notion of evolutionary progress is dependent – can have the effect of misdirecting our attention, in ways that are crucial in the ...”

“... he wants there, having multiple skills and extraordinary, quiet energy. In Disgrace, which may be the finest of his more orthodox novels, one again senses the existence of resources of purity and power, and also reserves of feeling that may be tragic or even religious. Given his freedom to make any person in the ...”

“... such manifest design requires a Designer. The argument from design has serious weaknesses, but one may still wonder what to put in its place. Per Bak, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, thinks he has the answer: self-organised criticality. Bak applies this idea to a stunning range of disciplines, from geology, economics, biology and ...”

“... texts reveal: an encounter between the orphan and the double. In this literature, the orphan may encounter his double, or may serve as someone else’s. The double may serve as a friend or as an enemy, just as the romantic ‘second self’ may be ...”

“... Why are some people creative to the point of genius, even though they may not appear especially intelligent, or in any other way remarkable? Creativity is a long-standing puzzle which has received many trite and no very convincing accounts. Explanations range from the Divine Spark to slogging hard work; from unconscious problem-solving to super-conscious awareness; from the darkness of profound dreams to the brightness of extreme wakefulness; from slow gestations to instant insights ...”