“... the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.’ The ‘laws’ may of course break down – they are empirical generalisations, not laws of physics – but they are worth taking seriously because ‘arbitrary amounts of money’ are indeed being shelled out on the infrastructure of AI. In August, researchers for Morgan ...”

“... women on the edge of breakdown, but they looked pretty robust, if a bit impatient.’ It may be that Mass-Observation encouraged her in a habit which came naturally. Since most of us can bear the sufferings of others with fortitude, it would be wrong to mock Nella Last’s obsession with visions of drowning sailors and slaughtered hosts: but she does ...”

“... world of private allusion’. Thus when we read in In Memoriam. ’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand   Where he in English earth is laid,   And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land, there is an allusion to a passage in Persius to which Arthur Hallam had himself alluded in turning a compliment ...”

“... about the use of the SPG, and the ‘Sus’ law, or criticism of ‘Operation Swamp’? These may be examined when the Clutterbuck opus is next up-dated. In this book, he falls back on the eroding effects of television drama and documentary. Heavy fire is concentrated on Gordon Newman’s four-part series Law and Order, which he dismisses as agitprop ...”

“... makes it easy to use. This is not the author’s fault, but the publishers’. The publishers may also, perhaps, be responsible for the fact that the author makes no attempt to evaluate or compare testimonies. Old men forget, and things may not have been just as the characters here say. I cannot, for example, believe ...”

“... of biographies and autobiographies, Wagner-Martin worries that ‘choosing to write about a woman may not be the way to literary success: women usually lead lives that seem less interesting to readers.’ Such sweeping claims may have held true for an older generation. Carolyn Heilbrun recalls in the late Thirties and early ...”

“... modern blockbuster, is over six hundred and fifty pages long), a dimly observable possibility that may have to be confronted if things really get out of hand. Fortunately for yarn-lovers everywhere, they don’t. The war that Clancy has imagined is fought, from its beginning in a Soviet sneak attack across the Fulda Gap to its end in a settlement negotiated by ...”

“... Ehrlich’s detachment from her body introduces a new phase in her attempts at survival. Her mouth may not obey her instructions, but this failure enables her to separate her idea of herself from her suffering body, so that the woman who wishes to laugh is no longer the woman dying, but a friend at the bedside of that woman. This new attitude helps ...”

“... since then in electronics and computing power, and the black market in weapons-grade plutonium, may not have made it as easy now as many people, including Cathcart, fear. On the test itself, a combined operation of nightmarish difficulty at a site only marginally preferable to Piccadilly Circus, Cathcart actually outdoes his mistresses. And across it all ...”

“... omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change ... any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing.’ In Moo Smiley moves from the claustrophobic confines of family life to the wide open spaces of a Midwestern agricultural college, trading dark drama for four hundred pages of proficient ...”

“... the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female.Perhaps so, but we may be forgiven some doubt as to whether the fascination of Bloom’s ‘full identity as a woman’ is really what has got her book analysed in newspaper columns, crowed over at cocktail parties and passed about among friends with the relevant pages increasingly ...”

“... has been addressed to the Standard by Lord Salisbury’s House Steward. The Editor of the Standard may, perhaps, be allowed to add that he is not much in the habit of receiving telegraphic instructions from House Stewards; not even when they are in the household of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness ...”

“... novel, being shorter, darker and less furiously though still adequately inventive. Its economy may shock some folk, for Peter Carey is known to be an exuberant novelist, copious, various and fantastic. It is possible to admire his books for their lack of respect for boundaries, for the qualities they share with the work of modern Latin American ...”

“... vine species which were resistant to the disease. The choice was by no means automatic. Hybrids may raise eyebrows in France today – the only hybrid permitted for the production of appellation contrôlée wines is Baco 22A in Armagnac and its use is being phased out – but they had many advocates in the immediate post-phylloxera world. Grape-growers were ...”

“... based on accumulated data that give probabilistic predictions of the correct molecular structure, may exist now, but they didn’t in 1951. The fundamental problem is that, unlike rays of light, X-rays cannot be focused to produce an image, or reflected to produce a mirror image. Yet use them we must, if we want to get down to the architecture of these ...”