“... had argued for state planning in The Social Function of Science. In response the Oxford geneticist John Baker set up a Society for Freedom in Science, with a passionate attack on any attempt to tell scientists what they should work on or the methods they should use. The conflict between Bernalian and Bakerian views of science runs throughout Freedom’s ...”

“... apartment had previously been occupied by Vaughn Meader, once known for his impressions of John F. Kennedy. On the night of the assassination, Lenny Bruce supposedly walked out on stage and said: ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The colour field painter Stephen Mueller lived in the building, as did the poet Eleanor Lerman, who worked in the ...”

“... media coverage as well as logistical support the West was giving them. But the Libyans who took up arms against Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya have sedulously avoided this label, at least when near Western microphones. Religion had little to do with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt: Islamists were almost entirely absent from the stage in Tunisia until the ...”

“... joke with her,’ O’Hagan said, ‘that she would one day be President of a new Ireland.’ She took down some of the photographs and showed them to me. I noted the smiles and the drinks and the look of songs being sung. ‘I really enjoyed Rosemary’s company,’ Ms O’Hagan said. 12. Raymond, my Unionist, wouldn’t come to the phone. I rang him from ...”

“... Algren and, as if taking revenge on Partisan Review she called him when she got to Chicago. Algren took her through the Polish neighbourhood, where he lived ‘alongside an alley full of steaming trash cans and flapping newspapers’, as she later wrote, in a two-room apartment without a bath. He introduced her to skid-row bars and the black ghetto. He brought ...”

“... doubted. In the Thomas household there was never an end to worrying about money – ‘the family took it for granted that my father had to worry about his income at the end of every month’ – for few of Dr Thomas’s patients paid promptly and many not at all, though ‘some sent in small cheques, once every few months.’ Thus the domestic economy of the ...”

“... that Roosevelt had had a change of heart. French expatriates in Washington, notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s ...”

“... go water-skiing. I wasn’t struck down again in the same way until May 1980 when I inadvertently took an aspirin. I remember looking in the glass and thinking that my face seemed to be acquiring an interesting artistic pallor, when I suddenly passed out, the aspirin having made my stomach bleed. That, too, was around my birthday, but in the intervening years ...”

“... British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy ...”

“... divide, if only just. Mozart’s last symphonies placed high demands on his players and took the music out of the reach of the talented amateurs who not infrequently joined professional bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his ...”

“... be equally true of its paraphrasable content.’ Taking issue with a recent editor of the Sonnets, John Kerrigan, she points to his lack of interest in the linguistic variation in sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... have known about that,’ and she might add, ‘Or could you?’ and these coincidences she then took, and expected me to take, as more interesting than what I had asked her. Certainly she never gave me the information I asked for. But she never answered any question that I put to her. She did not like it if one person talked to another. From time to time my ...”

“... libidinal investment in its perpetration. In June 2024, the right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:As Hitler … once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’ We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into ...”