Buffeted by criticism of his policy on Europe, battered by rebellion in the ranks over his bill to legalize same-sex marriage and wounded by the perception that he is supercilious, contemptuous and out of touch with mainstream Conservatism, Mr. Cameron earlier this week took the highly unusual step of sending a mass e-mail (or, as he called it, “a personal note”) to his party’s grass-roots members.

I think, for instance, that it would be impossible for our people to imitate the example of our neighbors, the inhabitants of Maine, — so long and so lately a part of ourselves — where, in the year 1839, there was a general uprising of the whole population, and an appropriation, by an almost unanimous vote of the Legislature, of the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars, for the forcible rescue of certain outlands, or outwastes, claimed by Great Britain;

One has only to consult [Jorge Luis] Borges's own Book of Imaginary Beings to encounter chimeras, phoenixes, basilisks, barometzes (the last a kind of vegetable lamb) and the like.

It's the life of Reilly, but we're not stuck on it at that … If I stay her doing this sort of work for another week I won't be fit to work all summer, for I'm getting lazier every day