“... likely to cause his downfall. At least this is less bizarre than the bracketing of Gorbachev with Peter the Great and Alexander II as ‘Russian rulers who seized their country by the scruff of the neck and hurled it onto a new level of change and growth’. Quite apart from the highly inappropriate characterisation of Alexander II, the analogy sheds little ...”

“... of Jack&Ian’s despised astrobiology. Unlike Jack&Ian, Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin are very keen on habitable zones, drawing two concentric spheres of habitability out from the Sun to mark the limits between which it might be worth looking for life. After reading Evolving the Alien this feels conservative, as well it might when one sees Goodwin and ...”

“... many millions of pounds of public money. Arthur Andersen replied that the Government had been so keen to get public money into Northern Ireland that it had not investigated De Lorean properly. Ministers grew increasingly irritated as Arthur Andersen’s lawyers got hold of Cabinet minutes and even a statement from Margaret Thatcher. Relations between the ...”

“... viable direction of evolution was towards greater complexity. Even John Maynard Smith, usually as keen a Gould-basher as Wright, is with Gould on this: ‘Since the first living things were necessarily simple, it is not surprising that the most complex things alive today are more complex than their first progenitors.’ This is a default trend, not a ...”

“... to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents). If Netanyahu imagined that by attacking Gaza he could inflict defeat on Hamas, and rescue his own precarious political career, he has ...”

“... the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... Prince’s androgyny if he’d wanted to – even with that Princess Di shag cut – but he was keen to show he was a grown man, a proper album artist, not an inoffensive, family-friendly pop idol.To launch his solo career he adopted a late-1970s Meatpacking District persona: hairy chest, tight jeans, Western boots, leather jacket, aviators, white ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... into the history of economic thought, it was Marx who made it famous. As the literary historian Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, there were good materialist reasons for this. Living in penurious exile in London during the 1850s and 1860s, Marx often had to hock his greatcoat for cash when his credit with the greengrocer ran out. In February 1852 he wrote ...”

“... recent years that reading has been challenged by academics, critics and some theatre practitioners keen to question the play’s impact and legacy. They have argued for the rehabilitation of the supposedly moribund theatrical culture that preceded Look Back in Anger, proposed alternative agents for the great changes in the British theatre which undoubtedly ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”

“... at all, the two young men were approvingly described by Fawcett as ‘strong as horses and keen as mustard’. One discerns the defiant – or fatal – note of amateurism. This was the team that set out to find the mysterious city of Z: three toffs from the English shires, a few native porters, some mules (for the early stages) and a pair of ...”

“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”

“... in New York, attracting a disproportionate amount of financial support from a new breed of keen young collectors, with Charles Saatchi at the helm. These favoured artists are the so-called masters of Post-Modernism. If anyone tells you that there is no such thing as Post-Modernism, because there was never any such thing as Modernism, sit them down in ...”