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“... Richard Feynman was one of the élite group of American and British physicists who developed atomic weapons with the Manhattan project in the Second World War. He flashed back into the public eye in 1965, when he won a share of the Nobel physics prize, and again two decades later when his formidable presence on the committee inquiring into the crash of the Challenger space shuttle forced the cause of the disaster into the open ...”

“... Eureka! Scientific discoveries, as everyone knows, are made by those flashes of insight in which the mind of a scientist perceives some previously hidden truth about nature. The deeper truth, occasionally alluded to but seldom pursued, is that scientists as individuals have little importance in scientific discovery. The reason is simple. Scientists are fungible ...”

“... In the last few years the University of Utah has bestowed on the world two much-trumpeted scientific achievements, the artificial heart and cold fusion. That two such seriously cracked ideas should sprout on the same ground is a matter that should worry the State of Utah considerably. Indeed, there’s enough embarrassment left over for others to share, especially from the hilarious tale of cold fusion ...”

“... How are scientific discoveries made? By geniuses, thinks the public. By great men, say historians of science. By giving us enough money, scientists tell their governments. Scientific discovery is evidently a dimly understood process. The new biography of Alexander Fleming by Gwyn Macfarlane sheds some unusual light on the fog. One reason for the prevailing lack of understanding is that the canons of writing in professional scientific journals – the ‘scientific literature’ – enforce a style of reporting that is profoundly anti-historical ...”

“... Under the Reagan Administration the United States embarked on a fistful of big science projects, from the space station to the superconducting supercollider and the human genome project. The usefulness of these ventures, by and large, lies in inverse proportion to their cost. The $30,000 million space station will serve little detectable purpose save making work for hungry defence contractors, whereas the $3000 million human genome project could one day allow the history of evolution to be read like a book ...”

“... Dr Oliver J. Gillie. In the present book, which gives a lot of attention to this case, Broad and Wade illustrate the inefficacy of scientific monitoring within the profession itself – of the procedures which those of us who maintain the integrity of scientists believe prevent or rectify scientific fraud. But the reason Burt’s findings were not subjected ...”

“... paternity trial and the partial myth of Kunta Kinte and Roots, alongside the discovery of Nicholas and Alexandra’s murdered children and what this reveals about the matrilineal inheritance of mitochondria – ‘the mother’s mitochondria, and only the mother’s mitochondria, becomes the mitochondria of her child’. ‘We use words like sister ...”

“... to pederasty among priests’. Two New York Times science journalists – William Broad and Nicholas Wade – were outraged at what they saw as bland indifference to the problem on the part of leaders of the scientific community, and in 1982 they published a book – Betrayers of the Truth – that alleged widespread fraud and judged science’s ...”

“... office in 1977. He didn’t seem exercised by the Supreme Court’s pro-choice decision in Roe v. Wade, he put pressure on Israel to return land to Egypt and he was insufficiently bullish towards America’s godless Communist enemies. He even chose a humanist, Walter Mondale, as his vice-president. In the early 1970s, Christian leaders had started building ...”

“... bleat to die? Nothing: you are not: woman blonde, called Chris. It is I lope to be your sheep, to wade Thick in my cordial blood, to howl and sigh As I decide ... if I could credit this. In 1948 Berryman wrote the first two stanzas of his ‘official’ rendition of the deadlock between duty and desire, the one for public consumption. When Homage to Mistress ...”

“... into the Velma of Farewell, My Lovely, who kills to protect the secret of her criminal past. Ellen Wade in The Long Goodbye, the object of Chandler’s most idealising prose, has murdered her alcoholic author husband and the woman with whom he had an affair. In the first novels the impotent older men could be wish-fulfilment versions of Chandler’s father or ...”

“... could relieve the cerebrospinal fluid pressing on Theo’s brain (before it was superseded, the Wade-Dahl-Till valve was used to treat three thousand children). Then in 1962 their daughter Olivia contracted measles and died suddenly of encephalitis at the same age – just seven – at which Dahl’s sister had died. Dahl never talked about his grief for ...”