“... the conclusion of the essay on Williams, he expresses himself as ‘horribly afraid’ that he may have given the impression that Wiliams was a moralist, and in several places he shows himself as anxious to obviate a related misconception about himself. In writing fiction he has never started off with any didactic intention, and much less any eristic ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... fell and rose in accessibility and nuclear resources rose and fell in acceptability. Coal may be taken as the extreme case of the run-down of Britain’s traditional heavy industrial base, with all the repercussions this entailed. But as an extreme case, it is also a special case, in which the paradoxes are not simply statistical. As an economic and ...”

“... was described as having nothing ‘remotely Poundian or Objectivist’ about it. Of course he may say that this is simply a matter of opinion but he should bear in mind that the extensive and expert Australian reviews of The Nightmarkets, hyperconscious one might think of the context in which such things are valued, saw no such parallels, no such ...”

“... and sanity, and perhaps a degree of envy, with the suspicion that the mad, agonised though they may be, are having a more interesting, or at least more significant, time of it. It’s not hard to imagine a near-future when the neurobiologists will have identified the physiological bases for all the major mental disorders, but I doubt that, even then, we ...”

“... masturbation is her suggestion.) No one would argue that the weak are incapable of abuse – it may be their only form of affirmation. It is nonetheless a problem when the reputed aggressor is so manifestly, as in this case, in the process of losing all his powers. Marsh is supported in her speculation, however, by the theme, unmistakable in the poetry, of ...”

“... A family on the throne,’ observed Walter Bagehot, in one of those honeyed phrases which may mean more or less than they seem to, ‘is an interesting idea.’ Indeed, it is. But during the past two hundred years of British royal history, it is an idea which has embodied itself in two very different human forms ...”

“... well prepared for mailing.’ Such instructions, as to a corrupt child, fill Unger’s pages. It may be doubted whether this mode of address would be persuasive with the implied reader, even if a person so stupid and venal ever turned to a book on this topic. Although this is a work of philosophy, the implied reader is also a philosophical imbecile. Near the ...”

“... true enough to be useful and simple enough to follow? The last problem has not yet been solved and may with present technology still be insoluble. Seven complete manuscripts of what we call The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle currently exist, along with a fragmentary eighth, but none, at least of the five major manuscripts, constitutes any more of a unity than the ...”

“... Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous consequences: he renounced the fictional space and limited the dramatic power of painting; what ...”

“... This is not a question of ‘values’ or ‘morals’: it is a question of sober fact. We may not have the evidence to answer it, but it is a scientific question, nevertheless. You can be sure that, if any evidence supporting the claim were discovered, the Vatican would not be reticent in promoting it. Indeed, the Vatican acts in a quasi-scientific ...”

“... called White Teeth ‘fizzing’ – and it’s been called many similar things since – which may sound a little misplaced with its hint of champagne, but it captures something of the boldness and variety of a novel that is 462 pages long and peopled with a generous selection of Londoners, immigrant and otherwise, who are followed over two or three ...”

“... about the room; a pair of shoes on the dining-room table. And what we regard as dirt someone else may prize; dirt is not natural but cultural. The move from the material to the metaphorical and cultural was often a short step; consider the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’, where new immigrants from Europe ...”

“... and music, her bold denunciations of bishops and emperors, her celebrity as a preacher – may be nonplussed by a first exposure to her writings. For Hildegard was at once prodigiously learned and, as she somewhat disingenuously claimed, ‘a poor, uneducated little female’. The point of this claim was to underline the prophetic authority on which ...”

“... measures should remain off-limits. Nevertheless, the self-conscious design of an emergency regime may well be the best available defence against a panic-driven cycle of permanent destruction. One thing only is clear. There is no chance of a carefully modulated response unless we take some critical distance from the reigning rhetoric of the moment. George Bush ...”