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“... If the reader prefers a sober consideration of these issues, he should read Darwin Defended by Michael Ruse, a professor of the history and philosophy of biology. We can now move to a section of the library which could be called ‘The Descent of Authors who write on the Descent of Man’. Ms Elaine Morgan is a fe-fi-fo-fuminist who writes books on ...”

“... and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing contribution to this literature. It astonishes because of the bravado of its thesis. Instead of espousing Gould’s tame view that religion and science are distinct but complementary, ...”

“... for Nick, and then two events occur that change everything. One is just poor plotting, a desperate ruse on the writer’s part, a hold-up ex machina. Amy is robbed of all the money she was carelessly carrying around to start her new life with, and has to resort to different, wilder methods of survival. The other is more interesting, and picks up one of the ...”

“... would be sold to an illiterate (but not innumerate) magnate has fallen away: it was just a ruse meant to help complete a larger bit of business. Binoche is giving up the TV series she has starred in and will perhaps play Phèdre on the stage. She wonders whether it is a sign of age even to contemplate the role, but reassures herself by recalling that ...”

“... drive a truck at great speed down a narrowing alley. The vehicle is too tall for the James Bond ruse of tilting it at an angle. It stays level and finally gets stuck between the walls. The two men leap out and climb onto two waiting motorcycles. It was all planned. This is where the mind comes back, of course, and we might think the attraction of the movie ...”

“... a long leash. The title Project Nim suggests an account of the scientific inquiry, but that is a ruse. The film is really a quiet, melancholy biography. Marsh doesn’t comment on his human subjects, Nim’s ‘parents’, keepers, teachers, questioners, but he doesn’t need to. With only one exception, they are so pleased to be interviewed on film, so ...”

“... that out is only the start of an immense process of comparison and collation, manageable (as Michael Reeve wryly remarked 17 years ago) only under ideal conditions unlikely ever to be fulfilled. That said, Reeve’s new text, a collation of 11 of the most important manuscripts, is probably the best we’ve had since Geoffrey put his pen down, and it ...”

“... shitting in the kitchen instead, unless that, too, is merely another linguistic construct. The ruse indulged in here is a familiar kind of levitation in which the inescapable medium of culture and language is used as a pretext for annihilating what Kristeva or Lyotard (or was it Wordsworth?) called ‘rocks, and stones, and trees’. It is hard not to feel ...”

“... war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’ – its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life handed ...”

“... and the Soviets had duped the West at every turn. The bitter Soviet-Yugoslav conflict? A mere ruse to fool the West: Tito was a KGB tool. The Sino-Soviet conflict? Another vast KGB ruse to make the West think the Chinese and Russians were at loggerheads when in fact they had planned the whole thing together. And so on ...”

“... bohemian compagnon de voyage were sore. An authoritative portrait of Fanny was given in Michael Sadleir’s Anthony Trollope: A Commentary (1927), the book which pioneered the revival of Trollope’s critical fortunes in the 20th century. The first third of Sadleir’s account is devoted to the novelist’s mother. Sadleir sneers at Frances ...”

“... on a bridge. The police were, in fact, equipped only with powerful flashlights. The flashlight ruse, if that’s what it was, failed to scare the remaining two escapers, who headed into the fenland darkness. About an hour and a half after the break-out, a police helicopter using a thermal imager guided police on the ground to their hiding place. The last ...”

“... Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is ...”

“... Nurse, it would seem, knows best. In the inevitably gory climax Sheldon turns the tables. By a ruse, he manages simultaneously to incinerate his number one fan and the romance she has forced him to write. He finishes her off by choking her with the ashes of the novel. Rescued and patched together (what’s left of him), Sheldon, a wiser and sadder ...”

“... no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as surprisingly, Townshend quotes Michael Collins, who had fought in 1916 and three years later became president of the IRB Supreme Council, insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ but ‘liberation from English occupation’.* Certainly it ‘did not change the relationship ...”