“... Experienced recipients of such letters must have learned to watch for that ‘but’ and to steel themselves accordingly. Especially later in his career, James found it difficult to separate the experience of reading other people’s work from the impulse to rewrite it. Not content with merely identifying weaknesses, he was forever taking up his pen to ...”

“... Sunrise promoter turned cybercriminal Tony Colston-Hayter, were straight-up capitalists.) When John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 1993, ravers were an obvious target. A year later, his government passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which gave the police the power to shut down any nocturnal open-air gathering of more ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... You don’t hate us in Scotland, Master?’ said Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Teuto-Gaelic classicist, to Jowett of Balliol. ‘We never think of you at all,’ came the lapidary reply. Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy ...”

“... learns the useful art of skipping’. Skip, then, to the moment when the American publishing house John C. Winston Company, taking Maugham at his word, hired him to demonstrate this art. Under the series title ‘Great Novelists and Their Novels’, the books Maugham had chosen were issued in new editions ‘edited by W. Somerset Maugham’ in 1948. In an ...”

“... big, lifting his claws to walk thrustingly forward and back – indigo, cyanine, beryl, grape, steel . . . (‘The Dream of the Unified Field’) This description keeps veering away from the eye into mental categories that attempt to dominate the eye, to bring meaningfulness to seeing. ‘What do I mean by true?’ I mean ‘something that can become ...”

“... the reconstruction. Averof got his statue. The stadium, open to view, is still in use. Thin as a steel ruler, and too tight on the bends to be much in demand for contemporary athletics championships, the Panathenaic Stadium staged the finish of the 2004 Olympic marathon. The rightness of its placement, against pine-thatched hills, a theatrical public space ...”

“... two decades Japan piled up annual growth rates of 10 per cent and more and produced world-class steel, electronics and cars, financed entirely by domestic savings, without a penny of foreign capital – thereby flatly contradicting the current IMF dogma that global financial markets are the key to rapid growth. Forced to rely on energy imports, Japan had by ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... Popov, head of the Moscow Property Directorate, wrote in Izvestia that ‘multistorey buildings of steel and reflecting glass’ were the future for Moscow and that the city was ‘not a museum of antiquity, not a city of tourists, not a Venice or Pompei... not the graveyard of a past civilisation but the cradle of a new, growing, proletarian culture based on ...”

“... Stewart in Georgia and Fort Lewis in Washington: men with hair cropped to a quarter of an inch and steel-soled jump boots. The Dutch merged Marines, Military and Civil Police to form the Special Assistance Unit of the Mariniers. The West Germans, who have no Federal police force, selected a unit of commandos from within their border guards, the ...”

“... particular less combative or more forgiving, and like him, running a tight, computerised ship with steel-edged financial controls and minute provision for membership consultation. (A comparison on this last point with the once fashionable and media-fancied ASTMS is vastly instructive.) It was fashionable among the more hero-worshipping industrial ...”

“... Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has been a crowd-displeaser, nor a crowd-puzzler. John Carey, a serious man except when he is writing literary journalism, chaired this year’s jury, and announced that he was in favour of ‘widening what might be looked on as the Booker’s scope’. He and his judges had, he thought, a preference for ...”

“... war mostly cast it as one for technology enthusiasts: a story of aluminium drones prevailing over steel tanks and Israeli-made loitering munitions blowing up rusty 1960s Howitzers. John Antal, a retired US army colonel and military analyst, called it ‘the first war in history won primarily by robotic systems’. It’s ...”