“... hit the button.’ Not the button marked ‘launch baby whale,’ but the one that makes you sell more copies than OK!, Hello and Heat. Ennis thinks that ‘the celebrity thing is bound to bottom-out’ because ‘too many people are trying to jump onto it.’ When it does, she’ll no doubt head happily off to edit Cetacean Obstetrics Monthly; but what will ...”

“... life-threatening circumstances. If excitement is what a commercial pilot is after, he’s more likely to find it working bush planes in Africa, flying supplies and international aid workers to remote hospitals, or running drugs through South and Central America or over Eastern Europe. Langewiesche admonishes those who believe the landing on the Hudson ...”

“... written a study of the subject, though there is Barbara Trapido’s novel Brother of the More Famous Jack, and it’s one of the themes of John Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. Among the many irritations must be to find yourself always referred to as so-and-so’s brother or sister, and to be written about as such by smart-arses. Ali ...”

“... on the situation in Venezuela was printed in this journal. So no one can accuse us of anything more base than indiscretion for pointing these things out.) Still, as somebody advised in 1890, ‘never turn the spoon over and look at yourself in the bowl; it is the action of a clown.’The Diary of Eva Braun, with a commentary by Alan Bartlett, is appearing ...”

“... I must declare an interest in this particular Thomas. Dylan, R.S., above all the heart-inscribed Edward – these I admire, respect, claim. D.M. I have had little luck with. Our relationship began with the publication some years ago of The Flute Player, a novel which, I had heard, concerned the life of Osip Mandelstam ...”

“... appear somewhat later, in the mid-Seventies, and is only now reaching full flower. Its origins lie more in the conservative revival of those years than in the leftist climate which produced the re-interpretation of the Cold War. But the new view of Eisenhower has been no less a part of the broad assault on mainstream liberalism than the new view of the Cold ...”

“... he was killed by a falling piece of timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen’s body anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased ‘he’ because ‘I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.’ The ...”

“... the low-key and an absence of grandeur. ‘Betjeman’s brand of evocation,’ Harries says, ‘is more about churchgoing than about the churches themselves, and tends to turn the focus on the observer as much as the object observed.’ Pevsner’s researches were more unrelenting, and if close observation reveals the ...”

“... these, not radical revisions of transmitted texts and world pictures, occupied the likes of Thomas Thomas and Cantrell Legge. Format and coverage conspire to make the book seem an exercise in that nostalgic obsession with the minutiae of the local past to which Cambridge dons succumb even more readily than their ...”

“... Any pushy, worldly man or woman of letters would like to find and befriend a Thomas Warton. The great 18th-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone, certainly recognised his usefulness. Malone, single-minded in his pursuit of standards of textual scholarship that would trump preceding editors of Shakespeare, knew that his friendship with Warton was uniquely helpful ...”

“... at bedtime. It also means he won’t be able to record the first session of his interview with Thomas, his nonagenarian mentor, a writer, historian and filmmaker. The sense of boundlessness is gone, bound as the narrator is by his obligations as a parent on the one hand and his duty to his elders and employers on the other. Such is the nature of middle ...”

“... the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party; during the war he was, according to Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, a ‘one-man opposition’ to the coalition government (Churchill called him a ‘squalid nuisance’). This didn’t dissuade Attlee from appointing him as minister of health (he also had responsibility for housing) in 1945. After resigning in ...”

“... for the wild, the wet and the non-artificial was most developed. Part of the achievement of Keith Thomas’s delightful new book is to explain these paradoxes. His central argument is that these are not real oppositions, but are linked as cause and effect. It was because of the urbanism, the industrialism and the general distancing and control of nature that ...”

“... Lewis Thomas is a physician, a scientist, a medical administrator, and a man of letters whose previous books, The Lives of a Cell (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and occasional writing for the New England Journal of Medicine have brought him a large following. The Youngest Science will meet his fans’ highest expectations ...”

“... rituals may be performed. Their interior space is frequently differentiated, with some parts more sanctified than others; access for women may be restricted and entry to the holiest areas confined to the priesthood. All these practices presuppose that divinity is immanent in the world, but in a localised way. The demarcation and protection of holy spaces ...”