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“... myopia’ for drawing lines between empirical psychology and philosophy. He urges a return to David Hume and William Whewell, for whom the two fields were one. ‘For much of the history of philosophy,’ Machery writes, ‘philosophers could not have imagined their philosophising as separate from not only mathematics, but also the empirical ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... was powerful enough, I avoided power. Then Mark stopped being the editor and there was Godfrey Smith, and then Magnus Linklater, both of whom were very nice. I was then called senior editor. The other day I went to see James Fox, who had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

“... of modern print technology. We are at the dawn of a new technological age: what Anthony Smith describes as ‘the third revolution in communication’ – the others were the invention of writing and of printing. The computerisation of print through electronic technology opens up the possibility of an abundance of information becoming universally ...”

“... lambent dullness played around his face’) – satire as longing, as true poetry. David Nichol Smith said: ‘He could not have given us our greatest epic; but he is our greatest satirist.’ Pope, who offers some strong competition, must have learned from Dryden the interaction of these two ideas. The gift ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... then, in the early Seventies, two things occurred which made the spark jump: I read Iain Crichton Smith’s translations, Poems to Eimhir, and I heard MacLean himself read his own poems in the original Gaelic. To take the translations first, since they were my first exposure: opening the book was like opening the door on a morning of sea-filled ...”

“... his escapades in interior-decoration – he turned his apartment in the family’s London house in Smith Square into ‘The Silver Room’, furnishing it with silver-foil wall-coverings, silver-topped tables, silver satin curtains and a polar bearskin rug or two – and then because of his eye-catching appearance, his jewels and magenta lipstick and ...”

“... for it is all that remains of the unpublished work. Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. She married at the age of 19, divorced, and some turbulent years later remarried the charming, handsome, emotionally unstable and fatally alcoholic bisexual, Reeves McCullers, who committed suicide in 1953, having failed to ...”

“... fearfully good-looking and I fancy I see a resemblance between him and the rabbit boy’s brother David, once a very naughty schoolboy, but now, I believe, a historian of art patronage in the 17th century at Edinburgh University. I have come to put a question to the Minister about W.H. Smith and its dominance in the ...”

“... determined to conserve the land of Britain against the assaults of oil magnates and Mr Buchanan-Smith, the Minister for Energy. (This January he has also twice denounced Macmillan for being soft on Russia: the only politician he has praised is his old favourite, Powell.) The column has a repertory company of fantasy figures – most of them mean, stupid and ...”

“... blood purges of the 1930s and the political infighting that accompanied his rise to power. Hedrick Smith, in his book The Russians described Medvedev as ‘a carefully calibrated nonconformist’, implying that he trimmed his sails to the wind. The conclusion suggested by a comparison between Let history judge and Khrushchev is rather different. The ...”

“... that a positive Greiss test had only one meaning: contact with nitroglycerine. Since the trial, Mr David Bal-dock, former head of the Home Office forensic laboratories at Nottingham, carried out exactly the same test on a series of quite different substances – on nitrocellulose lacquer, for instance, on nitrocellulose chips and nitrocellulose aerosol ...”