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“... programmes are acceptably ‘scientific’. Here we come to the heart of the matter. Eysenck may well be right to say that the common image of the scientist is wrong. He and Sargent may also be right to say that parapsychology is not the only area of science which has been convicted of fraud. ‘Is all IQ testing ...”

“... Thursday 27 May. Flight MA 611 from Heathrow to Budapest. The purpose of my visit is to look at Hungarian Book Week. The Budapest Daily News, which I pick up on the plane, carries a short preview of the event: a record 112 new titles are to be published for this year’s festival, with a total printing of three and a quarter million copies ...”

“... history of modern ideas about man. Foucault II is a ‘microphysicist of power’ who, after May 1968, examined modern techniques of social control. Foucault III undertook a comparative study of the pagan morality of the Greeks and Christian morality, with the aim of clarifying our own moral assumptions. The stage we seem to be reaching now is Foucault ...”

“... consider a star biography as merely the linear tale of a performing life’s progress. Rather, we may use star chronicles as springboards for philosophical investigations, however careless and impromptu, into our own sightlines. The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an ...”

“... on her father’s knee. Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can, you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position ...”

“... history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the disregarded speech and customs of the ...”

“... the most physical of facts cannot escape meaning (the empty face that intends its emptiness), and may contain or hint at a virtual existence (the unscathed nose which bears witness to the possibility of accident or assault). But the act of severity which announces writerliness is also its dissolution. Its double edge folds neatly up into the choice of a ...”

“... into more than half its carrier’s offspring, will spread. These genes are not merely selfish in Richard Dawkins’s sense of being selected to out-compete different versions of themselves in the population: they are ruthless because, as in the case of Medea, they can spread even though their effects are strongly detrimental to the evolutionary interests of ...”

“... been deteriorating, according to the Ipswich Star’s report of the inquest, since the previous May. His wife, Zoe, told the inquest that they had been seeking help for him, but the local NHS trust hadn’t been able to offer anything beyond a telephone chat with a GP. ‘The hospital services are always attentive and on the ball, but once you leave ...”

“... of Galileo in 1633 was a symptomatically dismal episode in the life of the mind. Wherever else it may apply, the historian’s ‘crisis of the 17th century’ seems hardly the right phrase here. Shall we say, then, that Rosa got things right first time: that in his style of artistic operation, he truly was ahead of his time? But surely there’s some glitch ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering ...”

“... and spoke of Wollstonecraft’s ‘imperfect heroism’, as Todd has it, she was annoyed; and when Richard Cobb’s review of that work subsequently appeared using the occasion to charge Wollstonecraft with silliness, egotism, envy, rancour, meddling, mediocrity and bad writing, she was furious. Describing these events a few years ago in Gender, Art and ...”

“... the Intolerable’ and ‘The New Calculus of Olfactory Pleasure’, so one may expect few concessions to the hilarity that sometimes marks lay responses to disorderly ordure. Freud was unusual in devoting some attention to the relatively feeble olfactory powers of human beings, and philosophers, as Corbin remarks, have tended to ignore ...”

“... to fill it. A collection of essays entitled The New Museology suggests where suitable candidates may be found. Paul Greenhalgh is one. He cheerfully announces that ‘in these times of desperate financial pressure’ – can he be referring to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘economic renaissance’? – museums ‘cannot exist simply as a receptacle guarding our ...”