“... more altruistic and noble than medicine? It comes as rather a scandalous suggestion that doctors may themselves be sick. Not just overworked and exhausted, and statistically liable to alcoholism, drug-dependence and suicide: but actually deficient in their psychological make-up. This shocking possibility has recently been floated by Glin Bennet, who argues ...”

“... You may have missed out on love, transcendental oneness with the Universe, the adrenaline rush of the warrior, but you’ve had a headache or a bad back. Pain is the one engulfing, undeniable, incommunicable experience we’ve all had. And yet for all its ubiquity, pain is a solitary encounter, a lonely way of discovering the certainty that you exist ...”

“... prolong our stay on the planet through physical survival and reproduction (and their refinements) may be the main priority, but recording our time here is pretty much what we do with our considerable spare brain capacity. Well, we have to do something with it, and it passes the time that would have passed anyway, but there are those, like Beckett and, it ...”

“... Discussing several different ways of viewing the post-1945 history of Europe, he writes: ‘one may, finally, see this phase of history in a European light’ – by implication, all other lights are somehow un-European – ‘and observe how many objective factors have combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united ...”

“... Someone has it in for Timothy Madden. Warned by a cop that the cops may be about to take an interest in his stashed cache of marijuana, Madden goes to exhume it. He finds instead a head. Blond, it doesn’t bear gazing upon, but it does have some resemblance both to Madden’s wife Patty, who recently upped and left him, and to Jessica Pond, a new consolatory excitement of his ...”

“... as subjects for tutorial discussion. Texts no longer have to be books: indeed, ‘it may be more democratic to study Coronation Street than Middlemarch.’ That verb ‘may’ is a quaint survivor from the world of tentative liberal open-mindedness, rather like the ghost of John Bayley infiltrating a branch of ...”

“... it was evidence of the beneficence of God: ‘for by this means it is provided, that the species may never fail, nor perish, since every male may have its female, and of a proportionable age.’ But while that might do for man, it will hardly do for those many species in which there is no monogamous pair bond and no ...”

“... the method. Sumner’s account of moral standing is that moral patients must be sentient and may, but need not, also be rational. Some moral patients may not be moral agents. Sentience, on Sumner’s reading of the neuro-physiological evidence, emerges in the second trimester of pregancy. First-trimester abortions harm ...”

“... and piously to expand upon it. After listening to Judge Cantley’s summing-up, some, he says, ‘may have wondered how such a conspiracy could ever be proved against a man in public life. But then the tremendous respect and deference we all feel towards men in public life may make it hard for us to believe that any such ...”

“... programmes have demonstrated, even a skilful web of visual aids and journalistic conceits may not succeed in establishing a connection between specialist and general knowledge of atoms, particles, forces and fields. Some masters of high science have become sceptical of any possibility of popularising their subject without making a mere caricature of ...”

“... and to risk missing both. Historians of science, who will be impressed by the annotation, may wonder why the text presents only a partial history of the subject. Other readers, welcoming the text as an entertaining and erudite essay on a topic of mesmeric appeal, may wonder why they are obliged to purchase a pound ...”

“... shown some embarrassment but have not, so far as I know, gone to such lengths. And however rum it may appear, the prize, if you look at the way it is set up, is unlikely to go to the kind of author businessmen feel they should own a piece of. The list of winners to date indicates that on the whole it is the moderate sellers, writers who are not exactly ...”

“... was born in 1900, and died in 1983. There can be argument over the exact date of its death. Some may maintain that it did not die until about 1990, others that electorally it died in 1980 or even earlier. There will be similar controversy over the role of Michael Foot: did he lead it to its death or did he just accompany it? Was he one of the physicians who ...”

“... into the new picture gallery at Dulwich and straight to the ‘Cuyp next the door’. ‘You may lay your finger on the canvas; but miles of dewy vapour and sunshine are between you and the objects you survey.’ To think of doing this is to realise that more than ‘deception’ is involved. We know it is a flat canvas and yet are happy to ...”

“... world is instead part of a vast game played by no fixed rules. The continuity between our cultures may thus hinder a proper appreciation of Greek science. The solution, Lloyd proposes, is for the history of Greek science to be carried out only in the context of careful comparison with other societies’ science: not in order to show how one is superior but to ...”