“... eat them, at which moment they are both tasted and smelled, via the back of the mouth? The answer may be partly psychological. Psychology does not seem to be McGee’s strong point: ‘If we eat half as many calories [by eating fructose instead of sucrose], we simply get hungry earlier’ begs a lot of questions. He will probably come up with more answers in ...”

“... Who could have invented Eisenhower, he asked, and no sooner had he invented a caricature of Richard Nixon in Our Gang than Nixon turned out to be caricaturing himself in the same way, locker-room slang and all. ‘No a man’s character isn’t his fate,’ Roth writes in Operation Shylock: ‘a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his ...”

“... of white racism was already on its way to becoming gospel. But Turnbull called it as he saw it; he may have been wrong, he was certainly subjective, judgmental and naive. His personal life (as we say) added to the myth of the handsome, charming hero. He was born in 1924, the child of a distant Scottish father and an eccentric Irish mother, who, despite being ...”

“... Hits Iceberg’, the balloon is still an object of inexhaustible rhetorical possibility. As Richard Holmes observes early in Falling Upwards, ‘all balloon flights are naturally three-act dramas’: the launch, the flight and the landing replicate the stages of every journey or human relationship – a set of parallels most recently and memorably ...”

“... explain the Earth’s structure and movement, and turned continental drift into plate tectonics. Richard Fortey witnessed some of the ferment first-hand while studying for a PhD in palaeontology at Cambridge, and in the 1980s, he used the distribution of trilobite fossils from half a billion years ago to work out the positions of some of the land masses ...”

“... emerges clearly from Michael Kurtz’s biography which appears in an excellent translation by Richard Toop. Kurtz records meticulously the genesis of all KS’s works to date and gives details of his global concert-giving activity. We may not be as aware of this in the UK now as we were twenty years ago. But he still ...”

“... fucked-up teenager who despised everything she and her chip-off-the-old-block, conformist, Cliff-Richard-adoring teenage daughter smugly stood for. I do see how awful it was for her, but I hate her, still and nevertheless.She was more or less out of my life by 1962, but the ‘ordinary provincial English housewife’ pattern, which I hadn’t come across ...”

“... when you begin to look at them properly that they seem stranded, shipwrecked by history. ‘Age may not weary them,’ Geoff Dyer has written of the army of bronze soldiers on permanent guard at First World War memorials, ‘but … powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.’ Putting aside, for a ...”

“... shaped by the scholarly collectors among its trustees. Of those, perhaps the most significant was Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824), who not only played a role in the museum’s acquisition of Charles Townley’s collection of sculpture and antiquities, but also bequeathed his own collection of Greek coins, ancient bronzes, gems, vases and Old Master and ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering ...”

“... the only ones hungry for these insights. The popularisation of behavioural economics was led by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge (2008), which inspired the setting-up of ‘behavioural insights’ teams in governments around the world (with Cameron’s coalition government at the forefront), and has nurtured a view of policy that is attentive ...”

“... as the only man who sees. Hence his apparent meekness towards the artist, the hungry artist, we may add, which was noted by Brian Sewell when he and Peter went to David Hockney’s studio. His behaviour and utterance were always colourful, and artists warmed to him, as did taxi-drivers, policemen and women. He once said to me: ‘Patrick, you’ve got a ...”

“... are too high, supermarket prices too low; TV steals readers, except when it doesn’t (thank Richard and Judy). Nobody buys books. In fact, they do: the annual turnover of the British publishing industry is now £2.8 billion – a little more than fish or cheese and a little less than bread. That’s right, bread. The UK bread market is worth £2.9 ...”

“... von Rom’ movement. Bujic is sure that Schoenberg acted out of genuine religious conviction. This may be so, but converting was also a gesture of self-determination: a way for Schoenberg to distance himself from Judaism without joining the Viennese cultural mainstream. Post-conversion, Schoenberg became more confident as a composer. His string sextet ...”

“... connected with an Edinburgh publication, the Mankind Quarterly. Lane is particularly useful on Richard Lynn, a professor at the University of Ulster, who is cited 24 times in the book, but whose research will strike many readers as questionable. The authors maintain that there is an accurate unitary measure of general intelligence, named g, first isolated ...”