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“... The historian Barbara Fields and her sister, the sociologist Karen Fields, open Racecraft, their collection of linked essays, by denying that there are such things as races. Race today does not, they point out, refer to ‘a traditionally named group of people’ but to ‘a statistically defined population ...”

“... writes, nearby, about one of them, and I would like to write about another – the novelist, Barbara Pym. To think of her in relation to a literary world, with its apparatus of publicity and reward, gives a sense of incongruity, but, of course, there’s a tale that hangs on the connection – the story of how this world turned from her in middle ...”

“... to the free states, and partly because of its substantial population of free blacks. But as Barbara Jeanne Fields argues in her classic study, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, slavery in Maryland was by no means benign, and free blacks could never feel secure under its shadow. According to ...”

“... via jobs, fellowships and book reviews, of his former graduate students. Many of them, including Barbara Fields, James McPherson, Louis Harlan and Steven Hahn, would go on to celebrated careers of their own. Most studied the 19th-century South; as a result, the Festschrift they produced for Woodward in 1982 has a coherence such books usually lack. Like ...”

“... the top. That brings me to my second excuse for breaking my vow. In some overwhelmingly masculine fields, which have not reached even the ‘statutory woman’ stage, surveys of ‘Women in ...’ are still as desirable as ever. Particularly is this relevant where the road to the summit even for men is uncharted, as in industry, where no specific ...”

“... mountains in the distance, the high-lying forests, the autumn light, the frozen watercourses and fields, and the fruit trees in blossom in the meadows, touched my heart more powerfully than I could have anticipated; but nevertheless, for various reasons partly to do with the Swiss attitude to life and partly to do with my position as a teacher, I did not ...”

“... Cavorting round their forms, and saw the fox (Corrected by our little son to Vox) Touring his fields, his land as much as ours. We had to move, but carried off the room In the box of memory like something sacred. Allow us back to entertain our heirs – I almost think you could untangle time. That simple one-way tide makes such confusion. How much we’d ...”

“... reason the French were far behind in penetrating beyond the comparative cosiness of the woods and fields into the starker wilds, in appreciating the beauty of mountains and the sea. In the same way they seem to have been distinctly backward in exhibiting a sympathy for animals. There is room here for some interesting speculation, which the author, perhaps ...”

“... a lot. It’s good to be painful because it will come round again and we won’t be ready: Barbara Allen’s cruelty, the night wind biting at scarves, pedestrians hurrying along. And if I so longed for you as to make the original millennial blush go away, us back to our pets, things we had to learn at school, I’d be ashamed of my distance from ...”

“... or ‘speculative grammar’, that treated the modes of signification. Akin to such contemporary fields as linguistics, semiotics and the philosophy of language, it anticipates the theory of a universal grammar, more controversially developed by Chomsky. Few scholars other than elementary teachers remained grammarians for life. Together with rhetoric and ...”

“... or later, usually sooner, by someone else. This is more true, not less, in particularly important fields, which also tend to be the most crowded. So hard does the throng of researchers bear down on nature’s secrets that the same discovery is often made by two or more different groups within a few weeks of each other. In pre-modern science, before research ...”

“... out of these poems, some of the depressingness goes away: Carroll’s ‘In winter, when the fields are white’ (whose desolation gave me nightmares when I read it as a young child) just turns into premature Wallace Stevens, as Praed’s beautiful ‘Goodnight to the Season’ is Regency Philip Larkin. But all Victorian-and-later light verse has, I ...”

“... then confirmed by aerial photograph. Modern battles, it seems, are won, not so much on the playing fields of Eton, as in the bathrooms of the aristocracy and the pages of medieval French poets. When the invasion was actually launched, Bernal crossed with the troops, though there is some dispute as to whether this was on D-day itself or with reinforcements a ...”

“... About two-thirds​ of the way through Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, the eponymous narrator, now at high school in a poor town in Virginia, finds himself branded as ‘gifted’ by a perceptive teacher. This means that he has ‘to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books’. By this stage of the novel, you know that he secretly respects good teachers and real learning, and that his scorn for academic endeavour is just bravado ...”

“... have been taken up by scholars across the social sciences and humanities, many of them in fields far from the orbit of science studies. In some quarters Latour’s ideas have proved unsettling, not to say infuriating. His statements, often in garbled versions, were targets of choice for science warriors throughout the 1990s and continue to be cited ...”