“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are merely temporary containers for their selfish ...”

“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... power for so long, the ‘sanctuaries’ Koizumi has never specified could only mean the cosy ‘iron triangles’ of powerful bureaucrats, hungry LDP politicians and the businessmen who court official favours, cash in hand. Koizumi was thus attempting the impossible – running against his own party, the one that had nurtured three generations of ...”

“... This may seem a back-handed way of paying tribute to the work of George Peden, whose iron-clad research in the public records has established him as the leading authority on the 20th-century Treasury, which long served as the butt of much of Keynes’s criticism of British economic policy. Nobody has documented its activities more authoritatively ...”

“... as in Sheffield, a Labour MP (Martin Flannery) married to a Communist wife, and a young engineer (Richard Caborn) who, doubtless under the patronage of his CP father and predecessor, began as a shop-stewards’ convenor at Firth Brown Tools at the age of 24, then modulated into a Kinnockite MP and, since 1997, government minister. South Wales, where ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... et Bazaine’. This is translated as: a famous fortress in which were imprisoned the Man in the Iron Mask (said to be the twin brother of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who wanted to keep him out of the way) and Marshal Bazaine, who had the bad luck of having to surrender Metz to the Prussians in 1870 and the good luck to have his death sentence commuted to ...”

“... and Lotte, his second wife, lying dead of their overdoses of veronal on two pushed-together single iron bedsteads, he on his back, mouth a little agape, in a sweat-stained shirt and knitted tie, she on his shoulder in a floral wrap and clean hair, and you can practically hear the ceiling fan going round. It makes Weegee look tame.Of course, the 43rd president ...”

“... there are poems that combine curses, doomed love, the sea and the elegy, such as ‘The Death of Richard Wagner’, whose penultimate stanza describes the effect of hearing his music: As a vision of heaven from the hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of                 a ...”

“... were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability of plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have ...”

“... post-war period the Vatican had three separate institutes training agents for missions behind the Iron Curtain. At the Papal Russian College, the Russicum, for example, ‘missionaries’ were trained in Russian language and history, hand-to-hand combat, fire-arms, and various chemical and machine-based intelligence techniques, before being parachuted behind ...”

“... 1965].TP: I went to see Burroughs. The two dead people I got to show this book to: one was Richard Hamilton who died this week; the other was William Burroughs was died earlier on. William Burroughs was very generous in a terrifying kind of way. He said it’s okay, and why wasn’t it science fiction? I had a very tough day with him. Very ...”

“... a play from Shakespeare’s company that showed the deposition of an anointed monarch. Richard II also had an ambiguous message about the outcome of Irish expeditions: hardly has the king set off to ‘subdue those rough, rug-headed kerns,/Which live like venom where no venom else,/But only they have privilege to live’, than the action translates ...”

“... thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry was also affectionate by nature and incurably weepy. He broke down in tears whenever he was saying goodbye to his (far tougher) wife, Eleanor, and his son, the future Edward I. After ...”

“... the dictatorship of the party.’ Ben-Gurion never concealed his admiration of Lenin, ‘a man of iron will who does not spare human life and the blood of innocent children for the sake of the revolution’. Eastern European Jews like himself, he believed, made the best Zionists because they had been touched by the flames of the October Revolution. After ...”