“... Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Kenneth Wilson, and their fellow physicists Jean Bricmont and David Mermin – with a selective group of the targets of their criticism: sociologists and social historians of science rather than, for example, literary or cultural studies theorists. The debate is joined also by a number of natural scientists and others who ...”

“... a number of books, long and short. Of these, the most distinguished is probably the shortest: David Fleeman’s Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr Samuel Johnson. Anyone with a bit of learning and a curious mind will find title after title to linger over in this tally of association copies. There is a second folio of Shakespeare ...”

“... I was ushered in to Colonel Klindt’s office. ‘I have come to request a visit to my husband, David Kitson,’ I said. ‘No visits for Kitson.’ He did not even look up. ‘Look –’ ‘It’s no good being difficult, lady,’ he said. ‘No visits for Kitson and that’s it. If you want to apply again tomorrow, well, that’s your affair. You can ...”

“... outlook. The Eisenhower family background was a typical American failure story. His father, David, like each of his siblings, had been set up on marriage by his father with a piece of property of his own and a small amount of capital. Raising a mortgage on the property, he then plunged into business; in two years it had folded, the mortgage was ...”

“... of feminism and the politics to which it has acquiesced. This is exemplified by Carol Gilligan and David Richards in Darkness Now Visible, as they seek to account for Trump’s rise ‘seemingly out of nowhere’. They tell an intricate psychological story, based on Gilligan’s earlier work on moral reasoning in boys and girls, about the ways in which ...”

“... my own. A computer game can be thought of as having both an argument and a story. If the argument held up, the game would work; if it didn’t, the computer would let you know, stopping the program to announce tersely that you’d made a ‘Mistake’ or a ‘Syntax error’, or that there was ‘No such variable at line 140’. I could, most of the time, get ...”

“... There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader ...”

“... success of the economy.’ And whose success is that, if not the rival for his job whom Blair has held at bay for all these years? There has been nothing naive about the methods that Blair and his acolytes have employed for that purpose. But he is being very naive if he believes that it is not to his thwarted rival’s skill that credit for Labour’s ...”

“... dismantling of structures of political domination and social solidarity, feudal fetters which had held back the country’s capitalist progress and which, in locally different manifestations, continue to block capitalist rationalisation in many other European countries. First among the events that put West Germany on the path to what it would later become was ...”

“... defined their mentality as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’. They held themselves and other puritans to severe account, an obsession they grew into a social vision. They were hard on sin and hard on the causes of sin; they urged magistrates and ministers to join forces, to wield the sword in the service of scripture. But, as ...”

“... which was the largest women’s prison in Western Europe at its closure in 2016, at first held 120 men and 27 women, as well as a number of boys over the age of eight. Men and women occupied separate wings and had separate tasks: women did the laundry and men and boys worked the treadwheel that supplied water to the prison (this was dangerous work ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... and the so-called Jews of today. If Zionism preaches a glorious history going back to the days of David and Solomon, then that history must be a fiction cooked up centuries later for ideological purposes. If Zionism maintains that Jews longed to go home, then they must have been content to stay put. And if Zionists base their claim to the land of Israel on ...”

“... trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no ...”

“... poet’s life find the MS first, but it isn’t the most important fact about her. Perillo, who held a degree in wildlife management, worked in the 1980s for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, assisting in veterinary laboratories, tracking predators in Colorado, and patrolling nature reserves in California, where (she wrote) ‘bird-watching was what I did ...”