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“... falling away. The Sunday Telegraph has ceased its passionate flirtations with nostalgia. Besides, John Major is either dismantling some of what she did or failing to conceal his embarrassment at the consequences of what he cannot undo. In the balance between exalting the Thatcher years and distancing itself from them, the Major Government has slowly but ...”

“... themselves perhaps only a generation or two away from the farm in Mayo or Meath. The clergy who took the boat to Liverpool were for the most part the sons of so-called strong farmers, men who owned a comfortable number of acres, in contrast to the impoverished small tenants, cottiers and farm labourers. The social background of these aspirants to the ...”

“... to show that it does not follow from our knowledge of science. Further, it would not follow if we took an entirely Newtonian view of physics: Popper’s rejection of determinacy does not rest on the indeterminacy of quantum physics, which he is in any case unwilling to accept at face value – but that is an argument I do not want to get into. He argues that ...”

“... It is sad to know we’ve been robbed of the songs that were to come from John Lennon. He was a master of his craft and made music that was personal and unique. In partnership with Paul McCartney, and later as a solo artist, he wrote songs that have become the soundtrack of the Sixties and Seventies. He covered a wide range of subjects in his work, from the Vietnam conflict and women’s rights to his own search for peace of mind, and in doing so, he became a mirror for two generations ...”

“... serious shooting had stopped. The most notable engagement between Irish Fascists and Republicans took place in Spain, during the Civil War; even that had a comic aspect, being entirely accidental. Still, Ireland in the Thirties did seem to retain the capacity for virile action, attractive to a certain disposition, which Yeats had finely described some forty ...”

“... of Christmas from the Cuban calendar. But in Havana, I heard the extraordinary story of what John Paul II said to Fidel Castro during his audience at the Vatican late last year. The Holy Father, standing close to the President, took the opportunity to ask him why he had cancelled Christmas. The direct approach does not ...”

“... In 1936, after four years of chemistry at Vienna University, I took the train to Cambridge to seek out the Great Sage, and asked him: ‘How can I solve the riddle of life?’ ‘The riddle of life is in the structure of proteins,’ he replied, ‘and it can be solved only by X-ray crystallography.’ The Great Sage was John Desmond Bernal, a flamboyant Irishman with a mane of fair hair, crumpled flannel trousers and a tweed jacket ...”

“... by an obscure one entirely because of its associational value. A small watercolour seascape by John Constable, though unfinished, trails clouds of reflected glory from the familiar Romantic landscapes and the atmospheric intensity of his big ‘six-footer’ canvases. If, however, paper analysis reveals it to be a work of the 1840s, probably by ...”

“... was printed anonymously in an April 1709 edition of the Tatler, which in its original incarnation took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired ...”

“... the stacked corpses and the few skeletal survivors in the Nazi death camps. After he died, Kaplan took some of these terrible photographs to school, to show them to other children, either to shock them or else because she missed her father: ‘I was trying to do what he would do, be like him.’ His is the approval, actual while he was still alive, fantasmal ...”

“... the connection is clear: ‘All my kirbigrips have vanished for a start this morning (yes, and WHO took them?), so what with searching for them and trying to find a slide, I hadn’t time to get my hymn-book before prayers – and of course the Badger had to choose today to inspect them, as she said she’s seen too many girls sharing recently. I suppose she ...”

“... offered in the end but the evils of their actions, had propagated but the baser instincts, which took root and flourished so effortlessly in this world they called, with a kind of black humour, new.’ The polity of Casquemada begins to collapse and violence, both random and politically-motivated, becomes common. Bissoondath’s delightful talent for the ...”

“... that it would be better not to spread the word about what life was like there?’   ‘Oh, I took that for granted!’ I also stood up. ‘Can I ask you one question?’   ‘Of course, ask away!’   ‘I fear that I may have difficulty getting hired. If they will not take me because of my past, can I turn to you?’   ‘Yes, yes, of ...”

“... Houellebecq, who was born in 1957, has either turned against, or never in the first place took to, the sexual liberalism in which his post-’68 generation grew up. In Whatever he conflates that liberalism in a cursory but effective way with the economic kind, to establish a harsh continuity between the ideology of laisser-faire which operates to ...”

“... the world that The Devil’s Alternative was composed in 44 days (some nine days more than it took him to write The Day of the Jackal, but lest one suspect a weakening of the authorial sinews, he reminds us that the earlier novel was 50,000 words shorter). Patterson asserts that ‘each of his books seldom takes longer than three months to write.’ And ...”