“... herself, put a practical perspective on the matter when she revealed that she was well aware her young men did not find her particularly sexually desirable but hoped that she would help them in furthering their film careers.’ In other words, one woman’s ‘uncomplicated’ joy in going to bed with a handsome man is a toy boy’s cynical power ...”

“... were staggering downstairs and out to our front gate. Information passed up and down the street. A young woman had been mugged. She was unhurt, and being comforted. Audibly the police were on the way. Soon there was the sound of their boots as they raced from their squad-cars and vans. I had heard that sound last during the Springbok tour of New Zealand, when ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...”

“... is that they contain two meanings. For instance, in Spring (1563), the head and shoulders of a young man is represented by many spring flowers. The particular meanings of man and flowers are not as meaningful as that there are two, instead of the usual one. Further, what is exciting is not the two meanings but the relationship between them, the gap and the ...”

“... certainly felt it necessary to keep on good terms with him. In the volumes under review the young John Constable makes several appearances. Farington gave him good advice about not taking a dead-end job as a drawing-master. Constable took this advice, but mercifully paid less attention when Farington suggested how he should develop as an artist: ‘I ...”

“... a gay LA eaterie, all waiters are dressed as cops and the maitre d’ as a police lieutenant. One young gay took the law enforcement fantasy to its natural conclusion and seduced a speed-cop into chasing him down the freeway. He refused to stop and the cop opened fire. When the wreckage was examined, it seemed the offender had come a moment before the bullet ...”

“... more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already served. Baker’s brief romp managed to produce two absurdities, the first comic in the form of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the second tragic, in the form of his refusal to ...”

“... Amis-Barnes-Ishiguro as among the younger pillars of British fiction. She was two years too young to receive a full entry in Margaret Drabble’s 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, which featured only writers born before 1939. She wrote feelingly in 1984 about J.G. Ballard, who was, she rightly predicted, about to be turned by ...”

“... not to invite a climate change denier to speak? ‘I hope it is just a first step actually,’ David Davis said, ‘in a programme to bring free speech back to Britain.’ Many of us who work in universities are familiar with these arguments. We are told that the greatest threat to speaking freely is radical left culture warriors who have the power to ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... The connectionist approach is different. In 1986, the psychologists James McClelland and David Rumelhart proposed a network that learns verbs by building associative links between stems and their past tense forms. The network is ‘trained’ by repeated exposure to such pairs, without any appeal to rules or innate knowledge. Pinker published a ...”

“... of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with Jesus. ‘My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.’ (Compare Richard Tull’s lament in The Information that, at 45, he no longer ‘snags on the DNA’. Amis is being literary; but Vernon is not supposed to be a writer.) For all the ...”

“... of European or American Muslims and benefit only the West seems to escape their attention. David Cameron and other Western leaders insist, as they do after every outrage, that the problem is radicalised Islam and therefore the responsibility lies within the religion. (Why was Catholicism never blamed for the IRA offensives?) The real problem is not a ...”

“... on this premeditated and systematic degradation of the humanity of an entire population, David Cameron characterised the Gaza Strip as a ‘prison camp’ and – for once – did not neuter this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defence against their inmates. It’s often claimed that ...”

“... when going in and out of the lab. The stepping-stone signified the independent spirit of the young scientists in the lab – they had all been to America – as well as their low regard for the virus as a health hazard. Bird flu killed only birds. Influenza’s secrets were falling fast to molecular biology. It was possible to explain why new strains ...”