“... aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results. When Crick and Watson lounged around, arguing about problems for which there existed as yet no firm experimental data instead of getting down to the bench and doing experiments, I thought they were wasting their time. However, like Leonardo, they sometimes achieved most when ...”

“... Peter Hennessy has chosen for the dust jacket of Never Again a picture that exactly captures the mood of 1945. A returning British serviceman is being welcomed home by his wife and small son. ‘Home’ is a pre-fab, decked for the occasion with Union Jacks. The wife is wearing a neat, knee-length utility-model dress ...”

“... have hit him had he not been forcibly restrained.’ It was in the work of an earlier member, H.C. Watson, that the Society’s future lay. He joined in 1840, and lived frugally as a self-supporting scholar on a small private income, devoting his life to the taxonomy and distribution of British plants. His Topographical Botany was the precursor of the ...”

“... of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of ...”

“... Work and scholarship mattered to teachers like Oliver Van Oss, M.N. Forrest, A.J. Marsden and Peter Hazell, fresh back from Normandy, Arnhem or the Far East. ‘You’d better realise how lucky you are to be here, and you’d better justify yourselves’: that was their attitude. I don’t detect the same pressures in Dixon’s book, nor the same ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... given that she is so far unscathed and might reasonably have expected preferment. Then Tom Watson in the Cabinet Office announced that he, too, would be leaving. As if all that wasn’t enough, the ‘Star Chamber’ set up by the Labour Party National Executive announced that four of the big expenses offenders would not be permitted to contest the ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin by ...”

“... Britons than to Roman soldiers and administrators. What it comes down to is another paradox. Peter Salway protests twice that Roman Britain belongs to a historical, not a prehistoric period. But to a significant extent, so it seems to me, it was a prehistoric (or at least protohistoric) part of an intensely historical world. The written history of the ...”

“... bachelors, and that’s still the template. Dorothy L. Sayers hardly seemed to believe in Peter Wimsey’s passion for Harriet Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ...”

“... chemical rather than crystallographic, and they played no part in resolving, as Crick and Watson did, the double helical conformation of DNA. Todd confirmed his mastery of the nucleotide field by the synthesis of flavin-adenine-dinucleotide, reported in 1952, and, as expected and predicted, he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1957 ‘for his work ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are distortions. Neither is this a matter of crude ‘equating’: of setting out to prove that the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was as important as it was in ...”

“... and suitable for life.As an illustration, in 1983 Lovelock and the atmospheric scientist Andrew Watson devised Daisyworld, a computer simulation of a hypothetical world in which ecological competition between daisies of different colours affects planetary albedo, or the amount of solar radiation that is reflected back out into space – one of the ways in ...”