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“... In the concluding essay of an adventurous collection, Stephen Jay Gould observes that most ‘classic stories’ in science are wrong. There are good reasons why he is right. In their reconstruction of the past, practising scientists have been apt to celebrate the insight of those who anticipated their own ideas, tacitly dismissing those who were blind to where the future would lie ...”

“... How to Be Good now extends this fine line of wit even further: Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon ...”

“... taking account of the literary attitudes expressed in the London Introductory and Leslie Stephen Lectures. The author of such a study would find it helpful to have some understanding of the scholarly work which was the main business of Housman’s life, since the relation of this activity to his poetry is of great interest. Mr Graves quotes copiously ...”

“... them, and when it is done with balance and integrity, as it is by John Barrell, Marcia Pointon or Stephen Daniels, writing on Coalbrookdale by Night, then the reader, whether they agree or not, gains by the reading. The history of art cannot be the history of art alone, but it must take the art into account. If the argument wanders too far from the picture ...”

“... Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of ...”

“... it should be made in future inquiries. Chilcot has called Maxwellisation ‘normal practice’; Andrew Bailey and Brian Pomeroy, who are leading an inquiry into the near demise of HBOS, have said that it is ‘legally required’. Our law is such that custom slides silently into obligation. But in fact Maxwellisation is a recent innovation, barely ...”

“... in its closing couplet: ‘I hate, from hate away she threw,/And saved my life saying not you.’ Andrew Gurr was the first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting ...”

“... secretly prefer this arrangement. ‘What Congress wants isn’t power so much as deniability,’ Stephen Holmes has suggested. It is less interested in claiming a president’s successes than in disowning his failures. ‘He is sovereign​ who decides,’ in the words of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, and the American president’s bomb power is one of the ...”

“... than most. ‘The circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly’ included ‘Mr Andrew Gilligan’s broadcasts on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003’ since these had ‘closely involved Dr Kelly’ because they had alleged ‘(1) that the government probably knew, before it decided to put it in its dossier of 24 September 2002, that ...”

“... many of whom pass through his pages leaving hardly a trace. David Frost, Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A ...”

“... for the population as a whole. Sometimes I say I have mild gender dysphoria: I like my life as Stephen just fine, so long as I get to be Stephanie now and again. At the merchandise fair, I was shocked to see myself in a hairdresser’s mirror after I tried on a shoulder-length wig: I no longer looked like a pretend girl or a woman, like someone trying ...”

“... is keen to have another child. If he could get Molly away from Boylan and ‘get her to bed with Stephen’ he thinks he could manage it provided Stephen preceded him – perhaps when Stephen returned to Eccles Street, as he promised. Joyce was apparently ‘shy’ about this bit of ...”

“... to play Scripps the religious boy, and doesn’t even bother to mention that he plays the piano; Andrew Knott from Wakefield, who comes in like the wind has blown the door open and knows the scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this ...”

“... chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front bench as the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she ...”

“... of screening for cancer. ‘The NHS spends a significant amount of money on health screening,’ Andrew Miller, the chair of the committee, said, ‘and it is important that this is underpinned by good scientific evidence.’ But the awkward truth is that much of the evidence is contested. The argument over breast cancer screening has been going on for ...”