“... at least be delayed until the screening. These two books remind us that technological developments may change the terms of the power equation, not only in broadcasting but also in the press. It is more than five centuries since Gutenberg invented movable type and so enabled printing to be developed on a mass scale. It was estimated that before Gutenberg a few ...”

“... grouped and weakly gridded, an increase in incomes for some, far from exciting envy and emulation, may for a time give rise to peaceful anticipation of delights to come. In segmented societies, on the other hand, societies of somewhat stronger gridding and grouping, societies divided by lines of faith or race or entrenched status, an increase in incomes for ...”

“... part of his private experience when he was not writing poetry. If music is combined with words it may be possible to venture on an exegesis not totally fatuous, but even here Bach is ready to transfer a setting of one text to something quite different: there are some remarkable instances in the four Short Masses about which Professor Mellers maintains a ...”

“... random changes to outweigh natural selection. The example is also interesting in showing how we may be misled if we study the fossil record only in one place. Suppose that, when the water table rose again, the new form had replaced the original one in the rest of the rift valley, instead of the other way round. Then, if we had examined the fossil record ...”

“... an enthusiastic trade warrior who occasionally indulges in anti-war rhetoric. His anti-empire talk may be as insincere as the ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ of Biden’s patrician national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Both nod to sentiments they can’t comprehend. After all, an anti-war position would imply less power, or less use of ...”

“... expect memes to ‘evolve’ phenotypic effects favourable to their own replication. However, it may make a crucial difference, as Dawkins acknowledges, that memes can replicate only by generating a phenotypic representation of themselves, whereas genes replicate by a direct template process. Dawkins’s meme concept has been criticised on the grounds that ...”

“... of political antibiotics. The degree to which the IRA in general, or Mr Gerry Adams in particular, may have been responsible for this or that outrage is largely a matter of theology. It is not just that the IRA – and indeed most similar para-military organisations on either side of the Northern conflict – have a well-known track record of evading ...”

“... in this world the virtuous are punished for every sin they commit, so that in the next they may have uninhibited bliss; but the wicked receive any reward which they deserve in this world, so that they may suffer fully for ever. The social inversion may be appealing to the ...”

“... another kind of politics was required. Gramsci called this the ‘war of position’, and it may be best summarised as a struggle to change the cultural basis of politics, to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class and substitute for it the hegemony, or, in Gramsci’s terms, the ‘common sense’, of the masses. This distinction between ...”

“... and explication. Much in its development, self-rebuke, heuristic methodology and findings may never be altogether cleared up. And in so far as it is a critique of all metaphysical pretentions, and a series of exercises which the reader is meant to reject after having striven with the utmost honesty to repeat them, it is by no means evident that such ...”

“... need-to-tell, what John Updike has diagnosed as an urge ‘to cover the world in fiction’. Money may have been the definitive portrait of Eighties materialism, but Amis has a sly suspicion that we haven’t yet tired of reading about the things we cannot get too much of – like fame and money, sex and information. Amis’s latest anti-hero suffers from too ...”

“... Though he usually couldn’t cure, a physician could take good care, and a 20th-century reader may envy all the extended house-calls described here and the assiduous vigilance at the bedside – not to mention, in the earlier decades at least, the generous use of opium. (Fears of working-class addiction led to severe restrictions on the drug later ...”

“... by the frost, feuilles d’automne galette, as one might say. But, to return to our muttons, it may well be that pommes galette are done in the same sort of way as these Pommes Anna, but with melted cheese. Anything by Barbara Pym reminds us how much pleasure food in fiction, or at least in a literary context, can give; and it suggests that the experience ...”

“... sometimes merely wrapping in oratory some not particularly compelling observations – ‘the city may be defined, then, as that place where people come to buy and sell’ – and the book is perhaps best read out of sequence as a compendium of obscure facts and anecdotes, many of which are very entertaining. Short character sketches range from the fairly well ...”

“... and his throat had been cut. The body was discovered at 7 p.m. on 28 April; the autopsy was on 1 May. A week later samples and data were Fedexed to Goff’s Hawaii home – crime scene photos, insects from the body, soil samples and local weather information. On 14 May, he phoned in his final conclusions: the victim had ...”