“... a question of Mrs Thatcher’s notorious distinction between wets and dries: Conservative wets may be in favour of strong central government, but their main concern is with realising their vision of one nation, and with the obligation – albeit paternalistic – of the upper classes to protect the interests of the lower. Mrs Thatcher’s conservatism is ...”

“... the rules for writing down the correct equations, and if he (or his computer) works every hard, he may find the solution in the form of numbers to be checked against the experimenter’s – the wavelengths of spectral lines, for example. Bohr’s earlier quantum theory had not done this very well, but the new quantum mechanics succeeded brilliantly. From now ...”

“... the warm meat of her loins on his questing finger’ kind. News from Nowhere begins with the 1968 May ‘revolution’ in Paris: a great and blissful moment. It ends with a ‘loving’ wire break at Greenham Common by a grotesque band of de-sexed, hate-filled harpies who represent for Caute the very end of the line. The first sections of the novel, which are ...”

“... insists that not all scientific metaphors are to be counted as themata, however much insight they may convey. Where and how does he draw the line? It isn’t frivolous to point out that modern physics is using anthropomorphic metaphors, such as the ‘birth’ of a ‘strange’ particle, just at a time when psychology is studiously representing its findings ...”

“... to some five hundred pages that I have often consulted, never without profit.’ His tongue may be edging towards his cheek, for his own achievement in creating from the archives a being convincingly of his period, and consistent with the accounts of his friends and enemies, has been largely achieved by removing the apparatus which might muffle the ...”

“... books to him. Cooper infers that Walsingham ‘drank deeply from the wellspring of reform’ and may have been implicated (with other members of his family) in support for Lady Jane Grey and in Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary of 1553-54: perhaps this was one of the reasons he fled England shortly afterwards. No less formative was the St ...”

“... his own creator, rather as religious believers are supposed to do when they die. The same may be true of the hero of Dublinesque, who spots a man who may be Vila-Matas. Like many modernist texts, Ulysses ransacks mythology to provide a fractured modern world with some underlying order. The book, its author and one ...”

“... saw Igbo officers hunted down and murdered. Then the murders became massacres. ‘Massacre’ may seem melodramatic. But perhaps because the events leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war are so often eclipsed by the war itself, so little remembered, it seems an apt word for the thousands of Igbo civilians in the North who were killed between ...”

“... in detail from that of Aubrey Davis, the security guard who accompanied him to the site. It may be unfair to demand detailed and accurate recall of those moments when he and Davis marched along the smoke-filled Pentagon corridors on their way to the crash site, but there are more interesting lapses. According to the note his aide Stephen Cambone made of ...”

“... in his penultimate paragraph, ‘is about as futile as trying to catch Scarbo in a bucket.’ It may seem a disconcerting admission to find at the end of a 350-page biography; but in fact it’s a positive and exact assessment, characteristically honest, and at the same time a high compliment to its subject. Both in himself and in his work Ravel has always ...”

“... flow of aid from the US and elsewhere. He wants US troops to stay at any cost, and fears Karzai may upset Washington by demanding an end to US troops’ immunity from local prosecution after 2014 – this is what scuppered US plans to keep troops in Iraq. If all the US troops do leave, Atmar’s main fear is not that the Taliban will capture Kabul, but that ...”

“... who believed that all illness, physical or mental, was the work of the Devil, a conviction that may have been shared by Jesus. It is notable that he never once urges the sick to reconcile themselves to their infirmities. On the contrary, he seems to regard their illness as the fruit of evil, and his healing them as part of his mission against the powers of ...”

“... and reality doesn’t resist the renaming. The imagination and reality are often at odds, and it may even seem natural to take the difference between thinking of doing something and actually doing it as a sort of paradigm for the contrast. That certainly tidies things up. But in many cases, in relation to many actions, places, conditions, the imagination and ...”

“... focus on her teaching of philosophy. He insists that she excluded theurgy from her teaching. This may be true – in fact, it must be true, if by theurgy we mean ritual practices that would have alienated her Christian students. Still, Hypatia would have used ‘astrolabes and instruments of music’ to gain a better understanding of divine harmony: we ...”

“... grinding out the sentences that constituted Flaubert’s life-sentence in the service of Art (‘May I die like a dog,’ he wrote to du Camp, ‘rather than try to rush through even one sentence before it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ...”