“... about the ways new technologies and chemicals are already affecting our brains, and what they may do in the next few years. These chapters are very, very cautious (‘we just don’t know’). Both parts pack in an amazing amount of information, gracefully told anecdotes, and a certain amount of social-democratic ‘attitude’. But there is a ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...”

“... that there will always be ‘conflicts between one way of life and another’; that pacifism may promote war rather than prevent it, because it is more interested in giving the pacifist a clear conscience than in navigating the rough seas of actually existing hostilities; that deceit may sometimes be a political ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... doing his best to avoid the hazards and collect the rewards. As the game progresses, the hazards may get harder to avoid, and the rewards increase accordingly. There may also be a number of puzzles to solve, but these aren’t strictly necessary. The first commercial game I played was Snapper, closely modelled on Pac-Man ...”

“... and ancient and responsible for our most base behaviour, and that childhood nightmares of monsters may be traces of ancestral encounters with dinosaurs. (Like the idea that the heart is the centre of emotion, this seems to me a poetically precise description of a real phenomenon.) The connection of dopamine to addictive behaviour – Cobb cites a Facebook ...”

“... Cheshire, he notices, now has a fancy knot garden ‘exactly reproducing what the Tudor Moretons may possibly have had, or if they didn’t, ought to have had’.And the men and women who inhabit this land of dead but re-imagined great houses do not, Lees-Milne recognises, all see them in the same way. In the epilogue to the book, he mourns that – although ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... that to disparage the work – leg-pulls have an honoured place in modern art, and to suspect one may be intellectually preferable to a flight into allegory. Like Picasso, Hodgkin has his own technical alphabet and can do exactly as he pleases, as his brush pleases, according to his humour; it is, after all, the biggest of leg-pulls to kid us into believing ...”

“... reader a recognisable stock character. This is Ronald Reagan, here renamed President O’Reilly. (David Lodge’s version, ‘Ronald Ruck’, was funnier.) D.M. Thomas offers a farcical interview with President O’Reilly in which the old man is so confused that he can only answer the question before the last:     ‘What is your outlook on ...”

“... of the kind he usually visits on his readers. This time there is a ‘foreigner’s dream’ that may be a footnote, a preference or cold winds, a ‘countryman’ who may be a rustic or may be a compatriot of the foreigner who has the dream, and a ‘proper source’ that ...”