“... because academia has itself been cut down to size. Dr Gummett gives a full account of the two major battles where the scientific community learnt the limits of its aspirations. The first was over British participation in the construction of a new 300 GeV particle accelerator at the European Centre for Nuclear Research at Geneva – at a cost of £20 ...”

“... Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit ...”

“... was appointed manager – not at the time a popular choice – Ireland had never qualified for a major competition. Charlton changed all that, qualifying for and then beating England in the European Championships, then taking Ireland to the World Cup finals, then qualifying for the second round of the competition: as I write, a stirring no-prisoners-taken ...”

“... criticism could include Greg’s Calculus, why not Tebbit’s Axiom? ‘Minor works devolve to major writers as a function of market interest in research.’ Subsequent events have not much changed my mind. Though the Oxford editors are too honourable to notice, a price has now been set on their skills. This price goes up and down with the fate of ‘Shall ...”

“... an element of the energy which makes attractive fictional monsters as disparate as Richard III and John Self. Chicago Loop (terrific title) is another book that has a cold, clear surface and a lurking nastiness underneath. Its central character, Parker Jagoda (terrific name), is a 37-year old architect-turned-developer who, unknown to his ...”

“... and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched ...”

“... frequently reiterated belief that artistic ability was innate, reinforced his view of himself as a major artist. The very qualities that might normally have excluded him from the pantheon of British artists – lack of formal training, the mundane subject-matter of his work and the humble status of his medium – are transformed by Bewick into precisely those ...”

“... what dreams it licenses and which must be left unwatered, as it snakes through much of the major non-fiction of the West. The river begins in Colorado with tributaries reaching up into Wyoming and they gather force and volume as they rush through the magnificent canyons they carved in Utah and Arizona, through Nevada’s southern tip and down ...”

“... taken. Opposite Pidgeon, in terms of the novel and its equivalences, is the admirable figure of Major Brutt: sound, good, utterly reliable, a total and honourable failure patronised by everyone except Portia, to whom he gives jigsaw puzzles he can ill afford. They will not tell her about the puzzles of life, but they will eventually make her fly to ...”

“... of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety ...”

“... or Byronic about him. Though his funny face had great charm he was the reverse of handsome: John Sparrow, in one of his feline mots, remarked that ‘the trouble with Cyril is that he is not so beautiful as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a ...”

“... most admired of contemporary American writers; and it brings us to the first of Shadow Man’s two major faults. Layman devotes more than a hundred pages to Hammett’s development and stature as a writer of popular fiction, and it soon becomes distressingly clear that he is simply not equipped to carry out the task of literary criticism which this entails. He ...”

“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... made Catharine Macaulay. Partly through her husband’s interests, and partly because her brother, John Sawbridge, was a radical City MP and alderman, she was drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired ...”

“... mode, is that it works. It reveals hitherto unidentified meanings and ways of having meaning in major literary texts.’ The defence raises as many questions as it settles. Any number of critical modes ‘work’ in the sense of generating new and exotic meanings. But are those meanings worth generating? And what does Miller mean by ‘...”