what did the visitor see when he walked in the door? A dozen men and women of a certain age crowded into the sunroom of an east Toronto home to ponder the intricacies of royal lineage over sausage rolls. He could very easily have written them off as kooks.

Now we learn that language purporting to be the judgment of an independent body of medical experts devoted to the care and treatment of pregnant women and their children was, in the end, nothing more than the political scrawling of a White House appointee.

We’re still raising taxes on the basis of Kyoto, a treaty that increases government revenues far better than it limits emissions, if only because it sends so much cash up in smoke.

Christopher was so anxious to prove the uniquely murderous quality of religious belief that he attempted to attribute the murderousness of the militantly secular Stalin regime to its religiosity, the rituals of the cult of personality having some kind of anthropological or psychological similarity to those of religion. This is special pleading of so transparent a kind that Peter has little difficulty in disposing of it.

China was once the richest and proudest of civilizations. Faced with pretentious, eager, and greedy barbarians, the Chinese did badly, nursing feelings of superiority that blinded them to opportunity.

Female suffrage was thought to mean more votes for the dry cause and the cause of good government. The ‘superior moral force of women’ would save America from the saloon and from the plutocrats, who were ruling American institutions.

Quinton’s impatience with solemnity, his delight in puncturing intellectual pomposity, and his sense that there is no intellectual problem so serious or terrible that it cannot be made the subject of a witty after-dinner speech (he was proud of the fact that his first book, The Nature of Things, contained no footnotes) made him much sought-after as a tutor.

The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. [sic] It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication.