“... long-awaited Life of Picasso will leave its readers waiting impatiently for Volume Two. Long may it go on. Meanwhile it is a special kind of pleasure to be able to praise the book of an old and close friend, and be confident that the praise has nothing to do with the friendship. Volume One has an extraordinary story to tell. We might have expected to ...”

“... many of the most fundamental and difficult ideas in contemporary science. To give a list, which may be meaningful only to scientists, they discuss the concepts of equilibrium, competition, natural selection, entropy and information, symmetry and group theory, pattern formation, and conservative and dissipative structures. At the same time, they apply these ...”

“... formally lost the grandiose title of Great Repeal Bill, bestowed when it was introduced by Theresa May at the Conservative Party conference in October last year. The 1832 Representation of the People Act was better known by its grander, informal title of Great Reform Act. Indeed, this might be an apt precedent: the presence of the word ‘reform’ in its ...”

“... be especially favourable to those who are least able to look after themselves. Their intentions may be benevolent enough, but the effects of their policies on the lives of ordinary people are another matter. Even if the change is for the better in the long run, a transition period of confusion, loss of business confidence or unskilful planning, can be ...”

“... considering them unless compelled to do so. And with good reason: more than twenty-five years may have passed, but I distinctly remember how Frances Wood and I were warned that anyone contemplating working on the Mongol period in Chinese history would be issued with a bottle of aspirin, in view of the immense difficulties involved in studying an empire ...”

“... that cure the symptoms of disease. Our folk feeling that medicine has to be bitter to do any good may derive from the fact that natural cures often taste of tannins or alkaloids. A chimp with a stomach ache may seek out a broad-spectrum antidote like the bitter-leaf. Or it may swallow ...”

“... lively extrovert of the title proposes an excursion to the theatre, where he and his companions may hear ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,/Warble his native woodnotes wild’. Whatever Harold Bloomian Oedipal reasons one may impute for Milton’s decision to turn his towering literary precursor into an untaught ...”

“... familiar. Companies can make contractual agreements because we have legal rules to determine who may act on their behalf: the CEO of Tesco can make agreements for the company, a temp stacking shelves can’t. The rules that determine who can make agreements on behalf of the state are part of the constitution. Kings once made these agreements, and were bound ...”

“... to have been a love match, or at least merely a love match. One of Jacopo’s sons, Giovanni, may have been Mantegna’s pupil or protégé: he was five or so years younger than Mantegna, seems not to have achieved by this date any great reputation, and his early work was remarkably similar in manner to that of his brother-in-law, as is clear to visitors ...”

“... as if subjecting the world to continual enquiry on this important issue. The sign ‘V’ may somehow hold together the dispersed elements of V, or it may not. The trajectory and the history of the V2 rockets in the seven-hundred-page fantasia of Gravity’s Rainbow promote, as Richard Poirier remarked in a ...”

“... assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence. Accordingly I set down with no sort of misgiving that I am, Dear Lady Olliffe, Yours very truly Robert Browning. This jeu d’esprit – which testifies nonetheless, in ...”

“... many people who are willing, in the presence of others, to call themselves intellectuals. There may even be those for whom intellectuals are a fiction, like fairies. But most people would struggle to their feet to attest to their existence. ‘Intellectual’ is a word which is hard to use without irony or reproof; often, it is a slur, and it has often ...”

“... a beautifully written book, a tribute to the English prose which they rightly value. Some of them may not be quite so happy about his assertion that the style favoured by top civil servants is bland and neutral: that toughness and the ability to take decisions and carry through difficult policies are not considered to be great virtues, that problems are not ...”

“... the overmastering hate or love of any two people’? I suspect in passing that that cant phrase may have derived not only from ‘popular science’ but from scenes like the one the narrator records of undergraduates ‘making for the river’ carrying what he misnames ‘the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw’, though in point of pedantic fact it is in ...”

“... are restrained by a pack of ‘yellow cards’ and ‘white cards’ prescribing how and when they may open fire or carry out arrests. Political considerations, not the simple question of how best to find and destroy the enemy, govern their deployment and their actions. They are supposed to co-operate with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a force which 3 ...”