“... One is John von Neumann, whose team built the first electronic digital computer. The other was Alan Turing, who pioneered the logical theory of computation. It would be quite wrong to characterise the one man as applied, the other as pure. Turing was fascinated by all sorts of mechanical and electrical computational devices, while von Neumann was a ...”

“... quite elaborate commentaries on paintings (looking at the reproduction of A Sergeant of the Light Horse, I wouldn’t agree, though, with either part of his verdict that it is ‘a masterpiece of camp’) – he is expressive, too, when interpreting family photographs. His ability to make musical commentary and judgment appears less. In the second part ...”

“... through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic – exhibited ...”

“... to parents in sensitive ways. Months after the crisis began, new information was still coming to light. As late as August 2000 parents who thought they were unaffected were told by phone that organs had been retained from their children. When the existence of a collection of cerebellums was revealed, it meant a third funeral for some parents. Until the ...”

“... often passed Peter’s flat in Graham Road in Hackney late at night and he would see his workroom light still blazing. He wrote for virtually every copy of Art Monthly in its first few years and not just articles and reviews – he even wrote long epistles for the letters page. He was also writing for New Society and other publications. And then there were ...”

“... staged by the Alliance was far more important, since it had the effect of shedding a merciless light on Labour’s weakest point, and was all the more difficult to deal with because it was taking place within another party. Young is not at his best with opinion polls and electoral data. Examining the 1987 result, for example, he speaks of the rise in the ...”

“... attacked ‘the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell, who go about spreading sweetness and light … readers of Edward Carpenter or some other pious sodomite’. Carpenter met Whitman in person when he travelled to America in 1877. This first meeting with the poet and the 19-year-old farm-boy who was his companion inspired Carpenter not only in his ...”

“... Lucas has made unassumingness his gimmick. Physically small (shorter, as a photograph shows, than Alan Ladd), he has sometimes been mistaken for a handyman on his own set. He doesn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or eat sweets. He thinks TV is ‘amoral’, though he used to enjoy watching Walter Cronkite at 9 p.m., after the day’s work had been done. He has ...”

“... fly tonight. Tonight the Third World War will not begin. There’s so much concentrated heat and light Stored around here that if they pulled the pin The British Isles would be volatilised. Even the dons would be a bit surprised. One theory says the Polish Army acted Only to stop the Russians doing worse. So clumsily to have a tooth extracted By family ...”

“... technology or the capacity of the nation to fight a war. The book had an extraordinary impact. Alan Clark records approvingly that Mrs Thatcher herself read it, and many of her ministers made public reference to it – which is surprising since Barnett is not a Thatcherite historian, but an economic nationalist. He believes that Britain’s problem was ...”

“... instance of terror came in 1986, shortly after the election to the Presidency of the populist Alan Garcia of the centre-left APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana). Seeking to embarrass Garcia during a meeting of the Socialist International in Lima, Sendero prisoners staged co-ordinated riots in three jails in Lima and Callao. Garcia ordered the ...”

“... are contrary to common sense.An examination of the two reports puts the cases in a very different light. The Nigerian national, a 31-year-old man, was born in the UK and brought up here. He had not been to Nigeria since he was nine. As the tribunal held, he ‘knows only the United Kingdom’. The case was not about returning a migrant to his country of ...”

“... confine yourself to England’s managed, temperate landscape the picture you get is very limited. Alan Mitchell’s Trees of Britain and Northern Europe, a field guide which reckons to include ‘every species and large-growing cultivar to be seen in the countryside, parks and gardens of Europe north of the Mediterranean littoral’, is a book of modest ...”

“... political space more properly belonging to the sovereign state. In Atheism in France 1650-1729, Alan Kors has shown that some of the most ingenious arguments for atheism in the Enlightenment were first aired in the teaching of Catholic seminaries which prepared priests to handle any eventuality. The religious Enlightenment is not the only missing ingredient ...”

“... calmed down. The story of Hypatia has been told many times and it isn’t easy to cast new light on it. Edward Watts aims ‘to recognise the life she led as well as the death she suffered’. He tells her story following the conventions of modern biography, starting with her childhood, moving on to middle age, discussing her death, and concluding with ...”