“... Retreat for Penitent Prostitutes), or to be protected by a patron, like Tom Jones the foundling or Stephen Duck the thresher poet, fared well. Foundling Hospital infants were especially favoured. They benefited from the mercantilist desire to make everyone useful; from polite society’s new fascination with the child as plaything; from the Enlightenment ...”

“... Lewis, Picasso and Gauguin. Music by Goosens and Stravinsky. Books by Wyndham Lewis, Proust, Stephen Hudson, T. S. Eliot, Osbert Sitwell and Zola.’ But she still couldn’t quite make the last act long enough, and when she died in 1933 she left The Triflers incomplete. I was nine years old at the time, and was not immediately told of her death. I ...”

“... title was La Historia de Mayta, but Vargas Llosa’s translator – not named, which is bad, but a small kindness in this instance, for he or she has done a sadly casual job – has quite thrown away the duplicity of that wording, with the crassly unduplicitous ‘real life of ...’ Vargas Llosa’s question is: is this the history of Mayta, or is it just a ...”

“... of most American scholarship and reporting on Russia. With a few exceptions – such as NYU’s Stephen Cohen and Pittsburgh’s Sean Guillory – even simple self-criticism is almost entirely absent from US Slavic Studies departments. Politically, nearly all the major scholarship of the past half century (some of it very good or even brilliant in terms of ...”

“... history, of the novels and poems of the Thirties, is of the same kind. He has a strong feeling for Stephen Haggard’s novel Nya, which he happened to find a copy of during the war, and which he feels to be a forerunner of Lolita, giving sound professional reasons why Lolita won out and Nya vanished into limbo. What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is ...”

“... not occurred, the dinosaurs might still be here. Under the influence of palaeontologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, the notion of progressive evolution has given way to a more makeshift world view, in which circumstances play as great a part as natural selection in shaping the history of life. In this view, chance happenings and sudden disasters may have ...”

“... it’s clear that the result of electricity privatisation was to take power away from the people. Small British shareholders have no influence over the overwhelmingly non-British owners of the firms that generate and distribute power in Britain. The fact that individual households and small businesses can choose to switch ...”

“... These might nowadays be ending their ‘black hole evaporation’ (a process discovered by Stephen Hawking) in bangs detectable from two million light years away. Bigger black holes, their evaporation too slow to be detected, probably litter our galaxy in large numbers as the remnants of stellar explosions. Other such remnants are neutron ...”

“... and began spreading among the dairy herd, there were two sets of reactions. One set came from a small number of vets, microbiologists and public health officials, who said: this is something to worry about. This reaction was countered by a larger group of ministry officials, chief medical officers, other vets and animal scientists, and above all ministers ...”

“... as ‘an occupied city’. It is hard not to feel that it was occupied by Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan and others too numerous to mention. Later, he writes: ‘After all, one of the first policies formulated by the Norman occupiers was to erase Gaelic culture.’ Once again, there is no footnote, no explanation. A few hundred pages ...”

“... be arrested this morning are violent and the police hold in their collective memory the death of Stephen Oake, the Special Branch detective stabbed by a suspect with a kitchen knife when a house he was searching hadn’t been secured. Much better, the theory goes, to do a lot of shouting and avoid anything more serious. For the team I’m accompanying, these ...”

“... into an enterprise dominated by accountants. Until then book writing was, with a few exceptions, small-scale and poorly paid. Publishing was not the corporate scheme Americans eventually made it, but still the cottage industry it had always been – or so it seemed to me, living precariously on a backstreet in Catford.Instead of being paid serious ...”

“... giants, the Arche meets the Stereo, the Perennial meets the Fad. Mitchell cites at the start Stephen Jay Gould’s reference to the ‘archetypal fascination’ with dinosaurs (giving rise, as Gould puts it, to schemes to ‘turn the Jungian substrate into profits’) and wonders if dinomania is not, rather, a matter of ‘something specific to certain ...”

“... of war with considerable enthusiasm. In addition to Wolfowitz and Feith, the group included Stephen Cambone, Lawrence Di Rita, William Luti and, on a part-time basis, Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Policy Board. Several of them had had a hand in rebuilding the armed forces, kicking the Vietnam syndrome, and winning the Cold War in the 1980s in ...”

“... the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is doing when he spots a small woman in her sixties at the other end of the counter looking at cosmetics. ‘And that goes for you too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners. Suddenly the little lady erupts. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a ...”