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“... Since its appearance in Germany in 1977, Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalytical study of fascist literature has graduated from the status of a cult work to that of a classic. Rereading it in English, a decade after my first, rather sceptical perusal, it is easy to see why. Much of what made Theweleit’s book so startlingly original in the mid-Seventies has since become relatively conventional in literary and historical studies, from the Foucaultian analysis of literary discourse, and the exploration of the political history of the human body, to a feminist perspective on sex and power ...”

“... Shale, and the insight its fossils provided into the early history of life, was made famous by Stephen Jay Gould in Wonderful Life (1989). Not that Gould himself first described any of these vanished animals: rather, he promulgated their importance to a world outside the hermetic palaeontological community – the Burgess Shale and its mysterious, extinct ...”

“... to us, or would it be reassuringly familiar? One way of settling the issue, suggested by the late Stephen Jay Gould, would be to wind the tape of life back to its origins, around four and a half billion years ago, then let the tape run again and see what happens. Ideally, we’d repeat this a few thousand times, and if then all of the reruns ended up ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as they recall the place of their youth. Two recent books provide instructive examples. Jill Ker Conway left Australia in the early Sixties to undertake postgraduate study at Harvard and thereafter pursued with distinction an academic career in North America – Vice-President of the University of Toronto, President of Smith College. Her childhood ...”

“... and with two rows of bent knife blades bristling along its back. ‘About 5 mm from the front end, Conway Morris found two arc-shaped bars, each carrying a row of simple, conical teeth directed toward the rear. The front bar bears a notch at the centre, marking a toothless area between the two side regions, each with seven or eight teeth.’ Wiwaxia would not ...”

“... the Supreme Court justices said in 2018 when they decided against hearing the case of Noel Conway, ‘that the ban on assisting suicide is an interference with the right to respect for private life protected by Article 8.’ But both the Supreme Court and the lower courts have made it plain that whether and how to refine the law, in particular by ...”

“... at Grunwick in the 1970s, for instance, or the mass campaign to get justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence in the 1990s. It’s easy to single out the excesses of campus politics and go on to depict anti-racism as an elite project – or its opposite, a form of mob rule. It would be harder to do the same with, say, the campaign to ensure that the ...”

“... were easily built on to accommodate genes and mutations, recent work has been more challenging. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, for example, used the spandrels of St Mark’s in Venice, which exist as a necessary by-product of the process of mounting a dome on rounded arches, as a way of illustrating the anti-adaptationist idea that certain features ...”

“... was the alternative? The next evening​ I arrived in what was possibly an even stuffier room, Conway Hall in Central London, for an Emergency Rally to support Corbyn’s campaign. Outside there was the inevitable Morning Star stall, and Momentum posters that read ‘#KeepCorbyn. We are the Labour Party. And we’re here to stay.’ (There was no sign of ...”

“... A father​ is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland ...”

“... this, the chief concern of the judges is to try to see things the Government way. Lord Reid, in Conway v. Rimmer (1968), best summarised the attitude of the Law Lords. The premature disclosure of Cabinet Minutes was, he said, in no way allowable, for ‘disclosure would create or fan ill-informed or captious public or political criticism. The business of ...”

“... of stage, on which Inglis’s gods and heroes disport themselves. Thus at the memorial meeting in Conway Hall there is Nick Garnham, ‘elegant, intelligent, disdainful Wykehamist’. Earlier, at the Garden House Hotel riot – a Cambridge protest against the rule of the Greek colonels – there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a ...”

“... were written to members of the Norton family.) With the Nortons in London, James saw Leslie Stephen, whom James’s father had also known, and met Charles Dickens’s daughter, who was, he reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a missal ...”