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“... men honoured for their contribution to our knowledge of the brain: Roger Sperry from Cal Tech and David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel from Harvard. Their discoveries are stunning, counter-intuitive and of no immediate practical consequence. They are therefore widely unknown outside their fraternity. A further reason for their obscurity is that the hard facts they ...”

“... in anything approaching a full way. The Times gave it modest coverage, both through the columns of David Wood and through its reports of debates in the plenary sessions. For all practical purposes, the rest was silence.’ Something resembling silence also greeted the European Elections of 1979. These not only produced the present combative European ...”

“... to this fearful symmetry. At one extreme it has triggered the tricksy pretension of the Terry Johnson-Nicholas Roeg film Insignificance; at the other, it inspired Norman Mailer’s ‘novel biography’ of a ‘possible’ Marilyn, which proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... the summer of 2010, that is, when it was revealed that Low’s family was distantly related to David Cameron’s. Shortly after the prime minister returned from his first official visit to India, the Sunday Times broke the story that Low’s eldest son, Malcolm, had taken part in the brutal suppression of the rebels in 1857, leaving a graphic account in ...”

“... We know these to be facts because newspapers and electronic media have exposed them fearlessly. David Cameron, when he was prime minister, was so concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise of the compensation culture over the ...”

“... and his book will always be intriguing. But short of some bibliometric equivalent to Masters and Johnson, it’s hard to see how the sociologist can ever penetrate the mystery. A question which recurs time and again in reading Mann is why sociology doesn’t work for literature. Take his stab at defining the ‘serious’ novel, so as to bring it into line ...”

“... treatise on sheep management, The Fleece. The essay on language centres on the views of Samuel Johnson, but the periphery takes more pages, and is concerned with Lowth, Priestley and the anonymous ‘Brightland Grammar’, works which will be not much read again. No one is going to accuse this writer of populism or of mere propaganda. In the chapter called ...”

“... made by a court and attacking that court’s existence. Since he became prime minister, Boris Johnson has led a government that has devoted much of its time to undermining the capacity of the UK’s political culture, media and civil society to oppose it. Johnson seems to regard the law not as a core part of our ...”

“... surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”

“... I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have fun at the expense of Farage and Co. And so they do. But the impression an audience comes away with is that actually nothing much matters and that ...”

“... of the ‘lives of the poets’, a title that has little to do with Grub Street or Samuel Johnson. The favoured means of escape for Jonathan’s colleagues consists in finding an even more constricting straitjacket, a solitary cell that women cannot enter. We hear of a writer burying himself in a sub-basement padlocked from the inside, and of another ...”

“... shows such as The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, and discussed, with much enthusiasm, in Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You: Why Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter.* As Johnson explains, the key to these new markets is syndication, selling the same thing over and over on different platforms; and the ...”

“... Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft. When asked about this, the second in command of the space force, David Thompson, said: ‘We don’t need to tell the world everything we’re doing.’ The US hasn’t yet made what aerospace analysts call the transition from ‘space operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of ...”

“... English muffin’. GET IT DONE. Beyond the underpass with the satiric graffito of Boris Johnson shovelling shit for St Patrick’s Day, I crossed a set of ancient tracks, the Thamesmead Ridgeway and the Green Chain Walk. Here was the first indication I had noticed of a cult of neo-paganism. Under a shiver of leaf shadows, 1960s blocks with balconies ...”