“... arms deals, the drug-smuggling operations, and the still unconfirmed CIA activities described by Robert Woodward in Veil. While fully agreeing with many of her views, I think Didion is slightly naive, as if the Cuban exiles of Miami were the only such group with émigré interests at work in the US Government and its entrepreneurial adjuncts. Think of the ...”

“... illusions, those properties of coherence and inherence that make a good piece of writing a self-sustaining world of words. If you attempt something of this kind, you assume the burden of telling your audience, with appropriate method and emphasis, what they will discover that they already know; and there can be no greater challenge to those skills of ...”

“... as she was by the subsequent break-up of her wartime affair with the radio writer Gordon Glover. Robert Liddell, in his contribution to Dale Salwak’s volume, objects to too tragic a view of ‘Barbara’s hobby (generally enjoyable) of “unrequited love” ’, and as a friend of hers since 1932 his view has to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, Barbara ...”

“... author, William Jackson, a prominent figure in Exeter musical life. In a letter of 3 October 1799 Robert Southey sent Coleridge the unusual story he had recently heard from Jackson. At the age of 16 Bampfylde had gone to see the composer in Exeter, and had astonished him with his remarkable powers of improvisation on the harpsichord. Even after taking ...”

“... to expose some of the imperatives which have driven policy in this important field of democratic self-government. He shows how, before the Second World War, it was the Conservatives who first championed the idea of a Greater London Council. They did so for the obvious reason that it would mobilise the suburban electorate in such a way as to wrest power away ...”

“... and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to call Oates’s walk into the snow ‘fruitless’ is to declare oneself a member of the postwar generation. Until the Fifties ...”

“... Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a gentleman’s agreement: that so-called objective criteria had more to do with etiquette than Truth; that Truth or what counted as truth was akin to ...”

“... progenitor of electromagnetic field theory and statistical thermodynamics, but a man of self-mocking humour, whose obiter dicta would well fill thirty minutes’ chat. In vain: a physicist and eminent populariser of science told the producer that whereas a genius such as Michael Faraday would have been awarded three different Nobel Prizes had they ...”

“... are furious remarks by the likes of Randolph Churchill to the effect that Eden was ‘a hysterical self-serving prima donna’. Thorpe is so squeamish that even when he tells us that Eden’s son, Nicholas, died of Aids, he doesn’t explicitly state that he was gay. Yet, annoyingly, his opinions on all manner of other matters and politicians, right down to ...”

“... husk of him who sang will soon/be powdered glass underfoot.’ Here, as Galassi observes, the self-identification is even more explicit. The cicada for Montale has something of that Yeatsian place ‘where all the ladders stop and start’, as the key-word foce (‘estuary’, ‘outlet’) in the last stanza of the sistrum poem suggests. There ...”

“... in entropy, not to mention proclivity for paranoia, he shares), Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover and Don DeLillo. Often this distinction between Modernists and Postmodernists is artificial, and Gaddis seems to write in the gap between the two dispensations, between different orders of linguistic imagination; and here other peers come to mind as ...”

“... predecessors. Others, including Halley and his London colleague, the irascible natural philosopher Robert Hooke, had the idea that orbiting bodies tended to move in straight lines while at the same time being pulled towards some force-centre. Only Newton fully exploited its implications. He defined forces by the changes they produced in the motions of bodies ...”

“... interest in the hidden dealings of the rich and powerful. Tiny Rowland, Mohammed Al Fayed and Robert Maxwell have all received the treatment and been carefully scrutinised. His account of Maxwell’s affairs delved into the murky depths, but he also kept a wary eye on the dubious ethics of the business world around the man, and produced an interestingly ...”

“... cultural stereotype’: that of the pious female martyr, the embodiment of feminine self-sacrifice. The most powerful example in Britain was Edith Cavell, whose execution by the German authorities in 1915 for running a refugee smuggling network out of her nurses’ training school was useful propaganda for the Allies. British newspapers, which ...”

“... suppose and admire, and upon occasion celebrate, but do not call in question or discuss.’ Thus Robert Boyle, progenitor of English science, in A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686. Boyle found eight meanings for the word, and pretty much suggested we scrap the lot. No one paid him any heed. Nature is too deeply entrenched in our ...”