“... fact is he didn’t. From Darwin’s scientific difficulties to those afflicting his theory today: Brian Leith’s handbook of doubts about Darwinism is a succinct and opportune review of the latest critiques of neo-Darwinian gradualism, written, as befits a BBC producer, to put the intelligent layman in the picture. His survey of the literature (ranging from ...”

“... accomplishment: he ‘made America feel good about itself again’, as the Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney put it. But what exactly was it about Reagan that made Americans feel good?According to the conventional wisdom then and now, it was all about overcoming the dreaded ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ (dreaded, at least, by the foreign policy ...”

“... who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has gone before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed … with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own.’ Challenger’s dig ...”

“... worlds other than this; they are, of course, irritating for exactly the same reason.A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying to her husband: ‘Remind me to tell Austin that there is no main verb in that sentence.’15 January, Yorkshire. Trying to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for ...”

“... both stood smoking outside the portals of the library looking at the Daíl car park, remarked that Brian Lenihan, then a prominent politician, had hair that seemed to have been actually, by some ancient process, corrugated; or how strange it is, now that I think about it, that in 1978 when I came back from Spain, there was only one Mediterranean coffee-making ...”

“... not only each other but many others, three of whom were charged: Paul Colman, John McGuinness and Brian Anderson. These three did not make any incriminating statements and were released before the trial because of lack of evidence, but the detectives’ barristers in Court Eight could just as easily have been talking about the ‘so-called innocent Guildford ...”

“... description is something of an understatement. Spotted outside a pub in Dublin that evening, Brian Lenihan, minister of finance at the time, was white around the gills.)How did the transition from nation-state to member state come about? After the Second World War – Bickerton follows Alan Milward and John Ruggie here – a class compromise between ...”