“... In other words they learn from their mistakes, without stopping to wonder what it really means to learn or to make a mistake. It is amazing how much can be accomplished by machines that operate like this. It’s as though they were just waiting to be told that they should try doing it their way, not ours. The prince of this brave new world – and ...”

“... The programme of the moderate nationalists, he believes, can only be fulfilled by the most extreme means. This is what makes Kahane ideologically dangerous: he can claim that his policies only represent the logical extension of generally accepted nationalist principles – such as, in the case of Israel, the need for a Jewish majority. The extent of Kahane’s ...”

“... in a South American language, and other events entirely inexplicable except by supernatural means. But the sceptics were unconvinced. And they were right. The day after the prioress testified against Grandier, she condemned herself (she dressed in a shirt, with a rope around her neck and a candle in her hand, and stood in a public place, mimicking the ...”

“... for a pee, and contemplating all the other things he can do on his own, ‘not one’ of which ‘means “work”’. Larkin, that ‘nine to five man who had seen poetry’, needed his ‘toad, work’ to spare him the terrors of the blank page, especially in the years after ‘Aubade’, when blank is what the page remained, no matter how long he stared at ...”

“... for Physics with Schrödinger, and remains one of the youngest recipients. Though he was by no means finished as a physicist by this point – he continued to produce important, intriguing work in quantum theory and cosmology, most of which would bear fruit only later in the hands of others – the five-year period following his dissertation was one of the ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... cannot avoid reading into the past the preoccupations of the present.’ And in his case, this means he has spent his prolific professional life as the Whig historian of the Welfare State – not in the crude, teleological sense of seeing everything in the last two hundred years as leading inevitably and inexorably in that direction, but more subtly, in ...”

“... for that. Trump’s presidency was a kind of vacuum of seriousness: the relationship between means and ends was practically non-existent. If Trump had wanted Congress to do his bidding and reverse the result of the election it would have taken a monumental strong-arm operation of persuasion and coercion, the sort to make even Lyndon Johnson ...”

“... manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the electoral system and usher in an era of ...”

“... last years of Mrs Thatcher’s reign it was Perec, not Sollers, who – with the publication of David Bellos’s translation of Life: A User’s Manual – found a keen British audience. There were logics in these things, as we shall see. Perec’s reputation might easily have crossed the Channel two decades earlier. His first novel, Les Choses, was ...”

“... were digging. Usually, that kind of complicity should be enough to guarantee silence. But it also means that once someone decides to spill the beans, it’s because they’ve decided there is nothing left to lose. This certainly appears to be the case with Andrew Young, whose stomach-churning, jaw-dropping account of his time spent working for, befriending ...”

“... about doing things.’The most seasoned Bowenologist might struggle to grasp exactly what Marda means, in this context, by ‘climate’. But the scope of the term does indicate a significant broadening of Bowen’s conception of atmosphere. Lois, Marda thinks, should seek out a sanctuary more expansive than Sydney’s ‘mood, room, place’. For what she ...”

“... executive sent to Scotland to buy a fishing village on behalf of Knox Oil and Gas has no other means of communicating with his boss in Houston, Texas, than from a public phone box on the quayside across the road from the hotel. The locals have a whip-round to supply him with 10p coins, and thereafter attend assiduously on each visit to the box, wiping the ...”

“... tend to be more immoral than individuals.’ For King himself, according to his biographer David Garrow, Moral Man and Immoral Society was an early and crucial influence. It turned him away from the social-gospel Christianity which looked on war as a unique enemy of progress; Niebuhr, by contrast, taught that war was only one manifestation of that ...”

“... say, the Spectator. The interview with Macpherson is followed by an article on immigration by David Coleman (the reader in demography at Oxford rather than the sports commentator). He is worried that ‘a long national tradition, developed over many centuries, could diminish for no better reason than its inability to control its own borders.’ It isn’t ...”