“... is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the ...”

“... to a simple rule that determines their sequence in a given line by assessing the colour – black or white – of neighbouring cells in the previous line. The pattern is left to evolve through iteration of the rule. An astronomically large set of such rules can be defined, and Wolfram charted the behaviour of as many of them as he could. Despite their ...”

“... Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket ...”

“... laid on a grand night-time tour that climaxed in a visit to the Colosseum, which – according to Christopher Woodward in his excellent In Ruins – ‘was lit from inside by red lamps so that, as if ablaze, it cast a bloody glow on to the grass and the ruddy brick ruins on the surrounding slopes.’* Descanting to Albert Speer, his pet pseudo-classical ...”

“... is a shame, on the other hand, that the exciting theoretical work of complexity theorists such as Christopher Langton, Don Farmer and Stuart Kauffman was not incorporated into Keller’s synthesis. It’s clear that genes have a very real physical and chemical existence, and that the ‘gene kit’ and associated DNA regulatory components of a given species ...”

“... among them are posters of Rashid Ladoja, the sitting governor of Oyo State, and of his deputy, Christopher Alao-Akala, who is also running for governor. A little over a year ago Ladoja was impeached on trumped-up charges by a handful of members of the state assembly backed by a gang of armed militia; Akala assumed his place while Ladoja’s appeal wound ...”

“... to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics. But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,* the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with ...”

“... 1923. It’s like Isherwood’s retrospective marvelling, as he sets off to America at the end of Christopher and His Kind, at the unknown future and the unknown life partner who await him: ‘He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.’ Forster seems never ...”

“... Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had seen it was mesmerised not by the ‘issues’ but by Huppert, and not just for her acting – she’s ...”

“... and has been appropriated by all kinds: sophisticated literary critics such as Aidan Day and Christopher Ricks, slob biographers such as Bob Spitz, genuine crazies like A. J. Weberman, who, as founder of the Dylan Liberation front, used to conduct seminars to his groupies on the Dylan family’s garbage; fervent hagiographers like Paul ...”

“... no stigma attaches to being a secret fantasy-snob and no one minds being bullied in a book. But Christopher Sykes, who saw much of Waugh in the Army, and who remained a warm friend, had to remark in his biography that ‘to the naturally weak he was as merciless as he had been in his bullying schooldays ... it always utterly disgusted me.’ Nonetheless ...”

“... is not in the popular English vocabulary) live in a separate world in this country. It judges that Christopher Fry has a place in conversation, but not Roger Fry, nor Elizabeth Fry. The spy Fuchs has a substantial entry, but whereas the Macmillan Encyclopedia adds ‘his motives were idealistic,’ Pan considers it wiser to leave out that possibly unpatriotic ...”

“... politics – for survival in the competitive, meritocratic postwar world. These habits included a black-and-white view of reality, moral certainty, and a healthy contempt for birth and breeding. Leavis was thus already a fine, intuitive polemicist and self-advertiser, who hardly needed much help from acolytes like Ford. The aggression built into the ...”

“... he reverts to his disagreement with E.P. Thompson about the Berkshire Blacks and the Waltham Black Act of 1723 which made it illegal for anyone to go disguised into woods. The particular issue between Thompson and Rogers is the bearing of the episode upon Pope. Thompson’s sense of history, as he makes clear in his attack on Althusser in The Poverty of ...”

“... in the last five years towards centralising political power and building up the largest army in black Africa, but it has so far failed to make any real progress toward solving the national and regional problems of post-imperial Ethiopia: yet without this there is no possible way of consolidating the Marxist revolution to which Mengistu claims to remain ...”