“... that their spouses will be in the grip of a powerful obsession which they cannot share and which may drive these spouses to their laboratories even on Christmas morning. The passage reminded me of Odile Crick’s complaints about her husband’s prolonged periods of in explicable broodiness. On the question of racism, Medawar reflects on the remarkable ...”

“... the left of the Parti Socialiste. Many on the left suspect that Darmanin was behind the arrest of Ernest Moret, a radical French publisher, at St Pancras station, as he made his way to the London Book Fair last month. A foreign rights manager at La Fabrique, Moret had bought Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. He was questioned on other possible ...”

“... Refugee Scholars and Oxford University 1930-45, isn’t any of the great institutions that may come to mind, but Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. As the result of a slightly panicky policy of interning ‘enemy aliens’ after the fall of France, large numbers of refugee German scholars – most but not all of whom were Jewish – found themselves ...”

“... in Islam. Fundamentalist Islam, especially in its Quranic punishments and Us treatment of women, may appear ‘backward’ to many Westerners, but it is worth taking seriously Ernest Gellner’s suggestion that, of all the great religious traditions, Islam is in many respects the one most open to modernity. Certainly, as ...”

“... many successful physicists and biologists belong to master-apprentice lineages. Eleven of Ernest Rutherford’s students won Nobel Prizes. That’s partly because he vigorously pushed their candidacy for Nobel Prizes, and it’s also true that able students tend to seek out able teachers. Nonetheless, there is something in a research tradition that is ...”

“... or the West Indies); that Charlemagne had a flowing white beard and cared about education (but he may have been most popular because his coronation date, 800, was so easy to remember); that Philip Augustus was a good king because he beat the Germans; that Catherine de Médicis was a bad woman because she killed so many Protestants; that Henri IV wanted every ...”

“... critical works like this ‘will ever make much contribution to the common wisdom’. ‘We may have here an avant-garde that will never be joined by the main army – happy enough behind the lines and content with its familiar rations.’ Kermode is writing these words in 1980, and reflecting not only on Tanner but more generally on the ‘new ...”

“... by being kept in the background, Lawrence forced Frieda’s hand by writing to her husband, Ernest Weekley, with the news of what had been done. She had wanted an open marriage with Weekley and to continue looking after her children, but neither man was prepared to countenance the arrangement. For Weekley it would have meant humiliation, and for ...”

“... because he felt unsure handling the philosophical content), and the philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who was brought in to look over the text when Wolfram and Lévi-Strauss couldn’t agree. (The title was among the sticking points: ‘Mind in the Wild’, ‘Untamed Thinking’ and ‘Natural Ideas’ were all considered and rejected.) When The ...”

“... diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares Davidson’s colloquial language with the artificial fancifulness of Georgian verse which, in Eliot’s words, caressed everything it touched, it is easy to understand his reaction. Not all the contributors to the Georgian ...”

“... West for both humint operations and intelligence collection from open sources. What Soviet sigint may lack in advanced technology, however, it can often make up by espionage. Even comparatively low-level spies like Geoffrey Prime in Britain and the Walker family in the United States are sometimes able to provide priceless technical intelligence. There is ...”

“... royal event. This was Mass-Observation’s study of King George VI’s coronation in 1937 – May 12. Two hundred ‘observers’ were posted about the country and instructed to note what they observed: with the exception of those who kept a record of what they themselves felt, they were not to intrude or act as mediators – simply to observe. There are ...”

“... failures on the machinations of Jews. As Luzzatto suggests, Morès’s antisemitic fervour may have been rooted in these humiliations, and in another, when his first choice of wife – Louise Fould, a wealthy Jewish heiress – rejected his advances.Could​ Morès be a distant forerunner of Donald Trump, another adept of provocation in new ...”

“... much from Kipling, and Kerr quotes from Jeffrey Meyers’s biography on ‘the importance of being Ernest’. Through the persona of Krebs in ‘Soldier’s Home’ he exploited his own need for mendacity. ‘To be listened to at all he had to lie ... attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal ...”

“... violent – the belief in race and nation. Riddle? Farce? Silence? The regimes of Eastern Europe may have been oppressive and iniquitous, but the fiction and poetry written under them were for a time quite outstanding. This was partly because of the system, which was oddly literary in outlook and valued writers, though of course not as much as ...”