“... Iain McCalman has written a major book on a minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but Place’s life is a major subject, and this treatment of it – the first in almost a hundred years – does leave a sense of possibilities not explored ...”

“... we observe is ‘fine tuned for life’, a claim that was investigated in the book which he and John Barrow co-authored, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. It enters, too, into his expectation that our universe will be found to satisfy the many ‘Omega Point Theory predictions’ which he generates. These predictions concern conditions which he thinks ...”

“... he asks why, by 1965, there was no recognition of criticism in music-academic circles, given the major role it played in American academic literary studies, which at the time were engaged in a withdrawal from the New Criticism and in wrestling with the work of Northrop Frye. There was critical analysis of a particularly giddy sort centred on Princeton ...”

“... with self-referentiality. The March of the Long Shadows is set in Sicily in 1947. The narrator, John Philips, is keeping a watchful British eye on the nascent movement for Sicilian separatism. Things begin badly, with a note which tells us that ‘all the languages and major dialects of Europe but one share the ...”

“... lack of change in its composition. Our rulers are still drawn disproportionately from the nine major public schools (as defined by the Clarendon Commission report of 1864) and Oxbridge. Twenty per cent of Who’s Who entrants born in the years before 1880 attended these schools, and the figure is still around 10 per cent for those born between 1945 and ...”

“... Alternatively, setting her sights lower within the Chinese community would have been a major loss of face. Under the circumstances, a poor Portuguese was a creative solution.’ The novel recounts Wallace’s adventures among the Poons, and the gradual way he rises to become head of the family. One of the book’s strengths – one of Mo’s great ...”

“... pulverising concrete defences, these ‘funnies’, as they were called, were the brainchildren of Major-General Sir Percy Hobart, a highly enlightened professional soldier whose photograph is reproduced in Juliet Gardiner’s book. Bespectacled, beak-nosed, with a fine long, crafty face and solid chin, he looks like Hannibal’s or Caesar’s favourite staff ...”

“... Hillis Miller makes the convincing point that Bloom’s noisily proclaimed debt to Frye (‘The major literary critic in the English language ... a kind of Miltonic figure’) conceals his real obsession with Eliot (‘the abominable Eliot’). Bloom’s whole critical project, which emphasises the struggle for imaginative breathing-space between a poet and ...”

“... for his or her job. Meanwhile basic science is being seriously neglected, and some of the major functions of government science, such as the survey work of the Institute of Geological Sciences, are being cut back because they cannot attract ‘customers’s in advance of obtaining results. Privatisation carries the Rothschild principle into the realm ...”

“... human type. Most of this comes out very clearly and sympathetically in this little book. But one major factor is missing. Look at his name. Lev Davidovitch Landau was not just a Russian: like many of his brightest pupils, he was also a Jew. Was he really ‘born too late’? Had he been a student in the 1950s, he might not have found a patron such as Kapitza ...”

“... and a half decades, to consider the idea of progress today is necessarily to hold a mirror up to a major shift in modern consciousness. Because we not merely are so confused but also know ourselves to be so confused, a strongly distorting mirror is likely to be more illuminating than one which, with heedless fidelity, reproduces the full range of existing ...”

“... What John Horgan means by his teasing title, inspired evidently by Francis Fukuyama’s view of history, is not that scientists will run out of work worthy of all that trouble and expense, but that the great discoveries, on which the intellectual edifice rests, have carried us up to or beyond the point of diminishing returns ...”

“... derives in great part from its insular tradition, the absence of defeat in external war and major social disturbance at home, and the consequent extraordinary continuities of its elites and institutions. Italy, on the other hand, has been shaped by its geopolitical position at the centre of the Mediterranean, looking in one direction towards the Levant ...”

“... he is black. His chief adversary in the Democratic primary has the highest disapproval rating any major presidential candidate has ever had, and is mistrusted even by her natural constituency – white, educated, middle-aged, female registered Democrats – not to mention right-wing evangelical male yahoos in the red states who’ll be goddamned before they ...”

“... indeed. She liked the Reagan people very much. They’re so vulgar.’ The story illustrates the major problem of writing a biography about Margaret Thatcher: personally, she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow mind, little imagination and an immense, bullying ...”