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“... with quite the mixture of coolness and condescension accorded to the thoroughly rational man. Robert Musil wrote of the wife of a civil servant that ‘what she called “soul” was nothing but a small capital of capacity for love that she had possessed at the time of her marriage. Permanent Secretary Tuzzi was not the right stock to invest it in ...”

“... ordinary, daily life going on. Beaton languished for four years after the wealthy art patron Peter Watson, who was kind enough to him but emotionally committed to Beaton’s rival, Oliver Messel. For a while Stephen Tennant looked like a possibility, but no one fell in love with Beaton, though he hankered and ached. When he turned his attentions to Garbo, she ...”

“... that indeed make DNA for the first time ‘a subject of conversation’? (Might Crick and Watson have economised on all that trouble with the X-ray photographs – there’s a causal story for you – and just spread some gossip about the helix, as they did occasionally about their rivals?) What, above all, makes a project ‘possible’ for ...”

“... and its puzzling relationship with the Thing – the Establishment. Take the case of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, an eminent chemist, a progressive Whig in his politics and a champion of the equalisation of church revenues, yet who also issued An Apology for Christianity (1776) when he entered the lists against Gibbon. To what extent were Court ...”

“... into focus out of the historical blur) often with great vividness. The three men, Thomas Evans, Robert Wedderburn and George Cannon, were affiliated with ultra-radicalism and Spence before the letter’s death in 1814 – though Cannon, almost a generation younger than the others, was a late arrival. The first part of Dr McCalman’s study looks at the ...”

“... Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an embroidery inspired by Arden – or, more sinister, was ...”

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”

“... industry was created in 1976 ‘over a couple of beers’ at a bar, in a conversation between Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old venture capitalist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which ...”

“... procreational theory that constructs the male role as creative and the female role as nurturing. (Robert Alter is praised for using the word ‘seed’ in his translation of Genesis, where others fudge the problem by using ‘posterity’, ‘descendants’ or ‘progeny’. But the praise is immediately revoked: ‘Writing in the late 20th century, he cannot ...”

“... had promised a home fit for heroes, and this time Labour delivered. Five years later, Sam Watson, leader of the Durham miners, was able to claim, not inaccurately: Poverty has been abolished. Hunger is unknown. The sick are tended. The old folks are cherished, our children are growing up in a land of opportunity. Further, this miracle (for so it ...”

“... force a new trial failed before the Georgia and US Supreme Courts, while the former Populist Tom Watson used his newspaper to whip up rural Georgia into an anti-semitic frenzy. In the midst of all this, the outgoing Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. The Governor’s own investigation had uncovered a conclusive flaw ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... transmitted from one generation to the next. This was the problem which utterly absorbed James Watson and Francis Crick as they struggled at the beginning of the Fifties, in Perutz’s group at the Cavendish, to unravel the structure of DNA. They spent a lot of time lounging around and arguing – indulging in imaginative guesswork, one might say, instead ...”

“... scientists and by historians on great scientific figures of the past, from Archimedes to Crick and Watson. I at once suggested Maxwell, not only the acknowledged progenitor of electromagnetic field theory and statistical thermodynamics, but a man of self-mocking humour, whose obiter dicta would well fill thirty minutes’ chat. In vain: a physicist and eminent ...”

“... plant police), Pullman (model town), Mary Baker Eddy (applied ontology), Taylor (time studies), Watson (behaviourism), Sanger (sex) etc, etc.’ Clearly Gaddis is concerned less with mechanisation per se than with the ‘more pervasive principle of organisation’ which continues to govern ‘automation and cybernetics, mathematics and ...”