“... and interesting exploration of his theme centres on the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who accessed over a third of the country’s land area in one purchase from the French, then ordered it to be surveyed by a government expedition led by army captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. For Jefferson, American topography was ...”

“... Did the German physicists make no atomic bombs during the Second World War because they wouldn’t or because they couldn’t? This is the question which Powers addresses in his extensive study of German atomic research: a question finally answered by the recent publication of the secretly recorded conversations between Heisenberg and the other German atomic physicists interned at Farm Hall, near Huntingdon, in the summer of 1945 ...”

“... his subject. As a boy Wallace started out reading Hardy Boys mysteries and science fiction like Frank Herbert’s Dune; by the age of 11 he was mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for a tutorial on Stendhal. It was around this time that his parents gave him his own television set. He watched everything: sitcoms, game shows, Star Trek, soap operas. Among ...”

“... sliced-thin sentences leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by wiring themselves into consumer culture, conspiracy theory, pop iconography and spy-craft technology, trying to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic ...”

“... two reasons. First, the Contract was the most completely poll-driven manifesto in modern history. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s opinion-meister, ran questions by focus-groups and other poll-fodder until he found topics (like lower taxation) which rang a bell. If the bell rang, the plank went into the platform. If not, not. Most people don’t want a ...”

“... her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon’. Of the good people in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion we know nothing more than what is written; for before those works were published their author had been taken ...”

“... remarkable man. His people were from Derbyshire, which his poet son certainly didn’t advertise. Thomas Lowe Bunting took a Gold Medal for his MD thesis. He was later elected to the Royal Society in Edinburgh for his work on the histology of the lymphatic glands of all sorts of creatures. Bunting recalled his father’s ‘tiny surgery with a desk about two ...”

“... are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and ...”

“... at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the ...”

“... Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got rid of ...”

“... succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick’. A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. By 2008, in a frank admission during the run-up to the mayoral election, Livingstone boasted that he had feigned enthusiasm for the 2012 Olympics as a way of generating funds for brownfield development in East London and Thames Gateway, seeding his favoured pylon-forest ...”

“... in my uncertainty. Go down to the National Gallery for a meeting of the trustees, where Keith Thomas tells me that his polling booth in Oxford is next door to a pub in Merton Street and that, it being May morning, he had to fight his way in through crowds of drunken revellers, an ordeal he feels might deter tamer spirits. As a historian he speculates ...”

“... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...”

“... even Hemingway’s white-boned prose acquired loose flaps. Two years later, still stricken with Thomas Wolfe elephantiasis, Styron sends haunted dispatches from the asphalt jungle. ‘New York is vast, hideous and strewn with the wrecks of lost and fidgeting souls.’ Unlike so many others of his word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old ...”