Recession and rising unemployment have put paid to most thoughts of further EU enlargement.

In Descartes’s hands, two thousand years later, this hierarchical continuum of living forms, commonly called “the Great Chain of Being,” was polarized into a thorough dichotomy between mechanical, unthinking matter (including all minerals, plants, and animals, as well as the human body) and pure, thinking mind (the exclusive province of humans and God).

It was then as much the scene of continual spreaths, liftings, reavings, and herriments, as the Border country itself.

His hair banged even with his eyebrows.