“... view of natural science, as a search for ‘general laws’. General laws are, without a doubt, nice, if you can find them, but the business of scientists is to explain the particular as well as the universal; to understand things that are true for one moment in history, and other things that are true for all time; to supply facts that are beyond ...”

“... in the South-Western United States; some females in nature turn out to be, rather briefly, nice to each other. Do we care? This is of course unfair, since both writers might argue that they are simply looking at animals and are not speaking of human capacities, let alone sociobiology. But we’ve been through that one, and every ethological text ...”

“... hermits. Her nostalgia has grit. Americans taught as schoolchildren to think of Cather as a nice lady writing about the Nebraska prairie might be intrigued to read what she wrote about Prosper Mérimée: ‘I like his pride, and his contemptuousness.’ Or that her favourite Flaubert books were Salammbô and Hérodias, ‘those great reconstructions of ...”

“... of escape’ – escape from society. Finally (and to be taken foremost) is A Sort of Clowning by Richard Hoggart, perhaps the most usefully class-conscious English writer of our time. He created an accepted general idea of the British ‘working class’ in 1957, with The Uses of Literacy. He developed his concept, most recently, in his memoir, A Local ...”

“... In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd murdered his father and was put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain’s oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from the cover of Masters of Bedlam, gauntly silhouetted against a mottled sky. He seems to be looking at something he finds hard to bear ...”

“... of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy ...”

“... Labour Party infighting and malfeasance by British Muslims. Both cases were heard by the barrister Richard Mawrey, sitting as election commissioner, a man not shy of expressing strong opinions and with a knack for the headline-friendly phrase. In the Birmingham case, in 2005, Mawrey found six Labour councillors guilty of organising thousands of fraudulent ...”

“... science is always on his mind. ‘What a very good girl you are to write to me such very nice letters, telling me all I like to hear,’ he tells her in 1848, ‘though you have not mentioned the 2 new Azaleas.’ And: ‘you were quite right to send the Barnacles; but mind that in all ordinary cases, they must instantly be put in spirits.’ While ...”

“... on its career as the best-known lesbian novel in the English language. At heart, The Well is a nice long solid Great-War-period romantic novel. The ethos is that of If winter comes, or The Forsyte Saga. Stephen, the hero/heroine, driven out of her grand ancestral home, joins an ambulance unit, is wounded and gets the Croix de Guerre, and won’t declare ...”

“... be said about their place in the history of the English Church. They illuminate the attitudes of Richard Bancroft, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, who showed plenty of sympathy for a group of moderately anti-Papist but episcopalian Catholic priests and none at all for Presbyterian, or even non-Presbyterian, promoters of the ‘pretended holy ...”

“... in American Africans in Ghana (2006), visitors or residents included Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Adam Clayton Powell, George Padmore, C.L.R. James and more. Frantz Fanon wrote much of The Wretched of the Earth in Ghana, and the year before Ali’s visit, W.E.B. DuBois died and was buried in Accra. In February 1964 Cassius ...”

“... there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge ...”

“... 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 verbal skidding, D.B.C. Pierre is a conventionally good driver, and wants merely a chance ...”

“... Nabisco box factory transformed into an ensemble of vast halls to encompass gigantic sculptures by Richard Serra and others. The second road to expansion was more direct: the building from scratch of new museums as vast containers for huge artwork, as exemplified by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In some respects this bigness is the outcome of a space race ...”

“... to be British.I’m glad we got that sorted out. Meanwhile, the heart refuses to break at news of Richard Branson’s fortune shrinking by 42.6 per cent to £2.4 billion. Alex Chesterman – once of Planet Hollywood, now of planet Earth – has seen the value of his online car retailer, Cazoo, sink by 99 per cent. It turns out that the prime minister, Rishi ...”