“... to his Romantic forbears. The method of the book means that we have to attend to a great deal we may have heard before, such as brief expositions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Schiller: but it is true enough that the ideology, the pathology and the eschatology of the period under discussion have connections with those thinkers and many others roughly their ...”

“... from Sex and Destiny were published recently in the press, which gives a cue for how the book may be used fruitfully. It collapses as a sustained argument, but much is said locally, on its three main themes, that is forceful and convincing. Some excellent roasting, scalding and melting is performed in Chapter Eight on modern ‘sex religion’, and the ...”

“... is an Emile Zola trying to get out. But whatever the Mayor of Nice, Monsieur Jacques Médecin, may say, this is not the case with Greene. Although he has obviously seen himself in the same light as Zola, to judge by the title of his pamphlet and by references that are in the text, he has recounted a fait divers rather than a cause célèbre. There will be ...”

“... essential staple of the local Indian economy. Indeed, Brody conjectures that this corner of Canada may have been the earliest concentration-point for the proto-Indians who made their way from Asia into the new continent, and that the Beavers may therefore be heirs to the oldest continuous hunting economy in the ...”

“... even pushing in the bus queues are assembled together in an ominous chain of signification. These may seem to have common causes, common perpetrators, but their real connections remain obscure. This does not prevent them from being lumped in with terrorism and political assassination as the grist for a historical narrative of decline. Some of the more extreme ...”

“... to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear. Found in the Street is her exact territory; she patrols these Greenwich Village streets as if from a ...”

“... friend and Nevill Mott was another near-contemporary. Now that they are both about eighty, they may feel able to risk his posthumous scorn. Mott is a sort of father-in-science to me, and Peierls an uncle. Yet it never occurred to me, until I read these memoirs, how very alike their careers have been. They both grew up into theoretical physics just after the ...”

“... a yawn by the relatively small number of people who are looking for poetry, whatever comfort they may give to those who favour such roundabout methods of promoting a cause, good, bad or, like most causes, merely muddled. Amichai is a complicated character in whose make-up indignation, sometimes violent, is certainly a constituent, but only one of many, which ...”

“... innocuous (like the model’s fingers in the old man’s chest hair); the bull and the woman he may be abducting are both tied up, not very convincingly, with strings of flowers; a curtain comes down on the performance as a gentle shower of rain. The model still has on her Bacchic garland, and the sculptor is dreaming of his days as a wild thing. (Picasso ...”

“... called madness. Prideaux writes of his paranoia, but – one neurosis not excluding another – he may also have suffered from manic depression. Periods of intense productivity rapidly succeeded others of total fallowness; amiability followed reclusiveness and misanthropy. ‘I never go anywhere. I hate human beings,’ he told Isadora Duncan. One might say ...”

“... to stand for the same things they stand for. Their humiliation by their coalition partners on 5 May has given them reason to change tack: the mutiny of some Lib Dems in the House of Lords has led to the defeat of the police chief proposals (whipped by Clegg through the Commons) and opposition to much of the NHS legislation is now officially sanctioned by ...”

“... to have a distinctive number of Neanderthal genes. Stringer bravely suggests who the Denisovans may have been and how the Melanesians came to have such a mixed genetic heritage. But the reality is that these are unsolved mysteries. Here is another one: how can ‘modern behaviour’, as represented by innovative stone tools and symbolic artefacts, appear in ...”

“... the session were that girlish looks need more blush, sophisticated adult looks less, though they may need more mascara. I learned that a business card, held against the temple, prevents eyeshadow overshoot. ‘Eyebrows,’ the workshop leader said, ‘are a whole other world.’ Watching her manipulate her brushes, her eyeliner applicator, I remembered how ...”

“... they have the power to sink Third World economies. Half-understood, seemingly arbitrary actions may cause untold human suffering. She has no illusions about changing the system – she isn’t in any position to do so – but she disapproves of bankers on principle, just as her bosses disapprove of the literary flourishes she injects into the speeches she ...”

“... capitalist prosperity. Instead of the torch of freedom, Klein writes, ‘it seems that it may be the torch of authoritarianism that is being carried by those determined to go global.’ Both identify the chief menace of the modern world as the multinational corporations and their unelected boardrooms. Both suggest that the power and greed of these ...”