“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... The old notions of space and time are currently being turned upside down by theoretical physicists in their attempt to reconcile the two great pillars of 20th-century physics: quantum theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Lee Smolin, a major contributor to the subject, brings us right up to date with it in this book ...”

“... executors, apparently decided to publish a reader’s edition in short order. I hope it will be followed in time by a genuinely complete, multi-volume edition of the poems, with annotations. Meanwhile, this collection provides ample evidence of his power. One of Merrill’s mature lyrics, ‘...”

“... for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of production. And in this sense, I believe, we can today actually speak of an end to utopia.’ Combining a faith in technology with the confidence that only the wrong mode of production stands in the way of its fully ...”

“... At 17 I was (let me be bold, let me put it on record) gorgeous, and gorgeous in exactly the way a person was supposed to be in 1964. Thin as a leaf, a Biba size eight, hips that held hipsters perfectly in place, and legs that were perfectly designed for emerging from skirts that were little more than a pelmet ...”

“... There must be certain texts which become available to each generation in their youth and then remain with them: a background, forgotten bass rhythm throughout their lives. Certainly, I had forgotten about reading Erving Goffman in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Asylums, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and, I think, Stigma ...”

“... worth $1 million each, for the solutions to seven mathematical problems, which had been identified by a group of internationally acclaimed mathematicians as the seven most difficult and most important unsolved mathematical problems of the day. They became known as the Millennium Problems. The announcement had a historical as well as a mathematical ...”

“... 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it had been waiting to happen. Years later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun Pollock for South Africa. The Coloured all-rounder Basil D’Oliveira ...”

“... across the South. The plan was as optimistic as its execution was incompetent. His would-be guerrillas were carrying 950 sharpened pikes but no provisions, and Harpers Ferry lay in a region where whites outnumbered slaves by nearly seven to one. When Brown surrendered after 36 hours, ten of the 17 dead came from ...”

“... between the people in The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), the script for which was written by McEwan. In both cases, a young man from a class background about which he is very uneasy, who has an ailing mother, an interest in history, and wishes to write a book, falls for a girl from an upper-middle-class, bohemian family, only to find that she will not ...”

“... Water of Leith near Dean Parish Church and Cemetery, Edinburgh.’ I crossed back over the river by Dean Path and Bells Brae, to Queensferry Street then left at Hope and into Charlotte Square, the site of the Edinburgh Book Festival. Brian Parsons’s Committed to the Cleansing Flame chronicles a ritual shift coincident with the Industrial Revolution. Just ...”

“... they had a cautionary myth about it. The immortal rosy-fingered Eos, who is renewed each night by a therapeutic plunge into Okeanos, falls in love with the mortal Tithonos, abducts him, and bears him off to a life of everlasting love at the ends of the earth. But, like all fairytale victims, Eos gets the wish-formula wrong. Asking Zeus that her beloved ...”

“... active Volcano.’ He had cause to expect some pyrotechnics as the island chain had been produced by continental drift of the earth’s crust over a sporadically active volcanic ‘hot spot’. The islands’ blasted aspect, however, made them unpopular with visitors. Herman Melville, who visited in 1841, had the usual reaction: ‘Take five-and-twenty heaps ...”

“... levels of the World Trade Center in 2001, songbirds had been in the habit of doing so, migrating by night and mistaking the lights high above the city for stars. At least one ornithologist used to stroll along the base of the towers in the early morning, removing small corpses and rescuing the living. A lot of species have been too fragile, too particular in ...”

“... deaths that, in order for terror to have any effect, ever more sadistic methods of torture had to be dreamed up. In the mountains and hot valleys west of Bogotá, new styles of mutilation entered the argot: the ‘necktie cut’ involved pulling the victim’s tongue through a slit in the throat, while in the ‘florist’s cut’ severed limbs were arranged ...”