“... the realities of science in all their complexity. ‘Armchair’ philosophers of science such as David Lewis and David Armstrong, while holding to the claim that laws are spatially and temporally exceptionless, have tended to agree with Mitchell that even the most basic laws of physics are ‘contingent’. Roughly ...”

“... ask a completely random question like: were you breast-fed? Not – as you can see – that random means innocuous. Come at me at a bad time with that question and I will cry and cry. Lynn Barber has been interviewing famous people in British newspapers for more than thirty years. Her questions are inquisitive and extrovert, bold and clever. The ensuing ...”

“... for the foreseeable future: ‘America wants to discourage those powers from developing the means to protect that resource for themselves.’ Much of US power is built on the back of the most profitable protection racket in modern history. The developed Asian economies are heavily reliant on Persian Gulf oil and Qatari natural gas. Three-quarters of ...”

“... A recent Italian book on the films of David Lean is called Colour and Dust, and with an amplification or two the phrase offers a pretty good description of his later work. The colour is mainly orange, and a lot of the dust is sand, especially in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More generally, of course, the phrase evokes the director of swirling epics, a sort of Cecil B ...”

“... size.) In this same semi-sacral register, there are also beams with little crosses and stars of David cut out by metalworkers for families and friends of the dead. Most evocative of the fallen buildings are the fragments of the 360-foot antenna that once stood on top of the north tower, and most telling of the heroic response are the battered vehicles of ...”

“... May said her judgment, as home secretary, was that ‘remaining a member of the European Union means we will be more secure from crime and terrorism.’ You would think it is so obviously in the interests of all parties to maintain this level of co-operation and security that new agreements are bound to be made. But not everything will remain the same. For ...”

“... Lee understands the contradictions and complications surrounding the historical Malcolm. In By Any Means Necessary he recounts conversations with former associates of Malcolm’s which suggest all kinds of intricacies in the man’s life. Yet none of this appears in the movie: Malcolm’s journey from sin to sanctity is unruffled by any sort of second thought ...”

“... insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They ...”

“... theory argue that drawing in an international elite to buy penthouses in Battersea and Mayfair means that rising prices cascade down the housing ladder, all the way to suburban semis in Birmingham and terraces in Middlesbrough. The third thesis, which has become an axiom of contemporary political discourse, is that rising house prices are a product of ...”

“... as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the young Michelangelo to the 12th Olympic ...”

“... He wrote The Seven Journeys at this time (it wasn’t published until 1944) and made friends with David Archer, the publisher and bookseller whose Scott Street Arts Centre in Glasgow was a venue for the avant-garde of the interwar years. Graham met Dylan Thomas there, who was sufficiently impressed to include a Graham poem at the end of one of his own ...”

“... dilatory as possible, which may be one explanation for the dyers’ disputes in Birdsong, but this means that in satisfying his readers’ requirements sooner Faulks is doing them a disservice by not giving them what they don’t want. Perhaps it’s because he has the hope of moving on to other things. Here’s how the anticipated scene unfolds in On Green ...”

“... mortality levels. At some point in their lives Adam Smith, John Miller, William Robertson and David Hume began to question the theology in which they had been reared: Camic is convinced that ‘their revolution was a union of circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That Adam Ferguson did less original ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... David Bohm and Basil Hiley worked together for twenty years and between them developed a very unusual approach to quantum theory. Bohm died in 1992, but by then the book was almost complete. It is a magnificent monument to one of this century’s finest and most attractive minds. Painfully shy, and finding few fellow physicists willing to give a hearing to his new ideas, Bohm struggled for four decades to get beyond the orthodox views that he had himself defended in his Quantum Theory of 1951, long the subject’s standard textbook, but which later put him in mind of Escher’s Waterfall, whose careful construction cannot hide the fact that the water must at some stage be flowing uphill ...”