“... 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. It’s written for general readers, but is more than just another work of popular science: it is a serious attempt at clarifying the author’s own thoughts about the ...”

“... play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and coloniser will play, the masks ...”

“... Stephen noted), but with the help of his indefatigable assistant and eventual successor, Sidney Lee, the ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no ...”

“... but everyone in Britain gets a corporate-box view of the weather. ‘In the past few years,’ Brian Cathcart writes on page two, ‘I have watched a lot of rain through my big window.’ As beginnings of British books about Britain go, this is unpromising. The only more daunting marker of intent would be: ‘In the past few years, I have watched a lot of ...”

“... story in the first person. It has the contours of a moral tract. While ‘busting her ass’ at Lee Strasberg’s studio, Alison gets by on a handsome (but inadequate for the lifestyle) monthly allowance of $1500 from her father, who lives in the Virgin Islands with his new bimbo Tanya, who’s a year younger than his daughter. All her parents ever gave her ...”

“... Jacob Burckhardt, who did much to give the book its status. And yet Pico’s writings, as Brian Copenhaver has persuasively shown, are in essence medieval. Enlightenment philosophes joked about fusty theologians debating angels dancing on the head of a pin: such was Pico. Voltaire described him as ‘a blind man guided by blind masters’. Pico was a ...”

“... through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the ...”

“... I’d learned about growing up. And there was Kim Gordon, lined up between Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, in the middle of the huge stage, not a token girl bass player, not a riot grrrl in an angry all-girl band, but a musician among musicians, standing next to her husband, to all appearances equal, taking turns. It meant something, the way she was, and ...”

“... They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues in Detroit and Chicago, were repackaged and resold in the 1960s as the ‘Real Folk Blues’.When Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues ...”

“... but also the class of reader which may reasonably be expected to read each book. So, as the writer Lee Dunne would point out fifty years later, ‘A book that is clean at five pounds is dirty at fifty pence.’ Members of the Catholic Truth Society, established to assist the uneducated by disseminating ‘good cheap Catholic literature’, sought out and ...”

“... island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone cabin, how old I don’t know, but it would have been inhabited by Gaelic speakers who cut hay on the two hidden meadows further up the hill, or grew potatoes or oats on them. It’s a hot, sunny July ...”

“... Hong Kong, however, and produced the nearest it has had to a tribune of the people: Martin Lee, now 59, the son of a Kuomintang general who fled to Hong Kong, rather than Taiwan, in 1949. The younger Lee, trained in Lincoln’s Inn, became a leader of the Hong Kong Bar, a member of the Legislative Council, and of the ...”

“... fact, since we’ve long been able to draw on two hefty volumes of screenplays superbly edited by Brian Henderson. What I have described as idiosyncrasies, Klawans would probably regard as complications intended to reinvigorate well-worn comic formulae. He doesn’t by any means underestimate the strength of the contempt for ‘simple-minded ...”

“... The horrifying nature of these statistics is compounded by the case-histories they conceal. Henry Lee Lucas, subject of the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is currently on death row in Texas. He claims to have murdered 360 people across a range of states in the American South; the Police claim to have verified 160 of these killings: both claims have ...”

“... But they were greeted with almost unanimous critical disapproval and were box-office failures. Brian de Palma’s Redacted – in my view one of the two masterpieces among the four, along with Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah – failed even to cover its modest production budget. There was no lack of star appeal in the films: Tom Cruise, Meryl ...”