“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and prefigured in the stories of the Old Testament, hidden again in his incarnation, and held to be present in the Eucharist. He is the object of a form of worship in which rational thinking supports an intense spirituality.Some of these pictures – above all those of Philippe de Champaigne – seem to be direct illustrations of Pascal’s paradox ...”

“... public, and threatened to undermine the respect in which figures of authority were supposed to be held. Outside Parliament they caused a sensation, for though Hone published only 3000 of each (and withdrew them from sale partly because they had offended his father), the notoriety given them in speeches by the attorney-general and Lord Sidmouth, the home ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... invention filled the political vacuum, at least in England. A regency was rejected; James was held to have abdicated; and the infant James, who should have succeeded his father, was passed over for the crown, on the specious pretence that the baby was a pretender, smuggled into the queen’s apartments in a warming pan. The crown passed instead to William ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... the victim of Mammon and the casualty of market forces. In the days when the Church still held an entrenched place in the fabric of British society, the responsibility for publishing its own biennial Who’s Who was one that rested proudly with the nation’s premier academic publishing-house, the Oxford University Press. Gradually, however, this ...”

“... from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about both collections is the fact that they discuss two kinds of patronage and, at least on occasion, the relations between them. The ...”

“... birth falls on 7 February 2012, and Dickensians across the globe are stirring. Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other ...”

“... and fleeting, an imposition from without, no sooner bestowed than withdrawn. Take the case of David Hume. In the dark days of logical (sic) positivism Hume’s reputation ran high as the philosopher who first did away with causal necessity; he was thought to have shown that causation consists in nothing, objectively, but constant conjunction: things ...”

“... of a very old idea: the Quantity Theory of Money. This theory, clearly present in the work of David Hume and David Ricardo, was formalised in the work of Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou and Irving Fisher at the beginning of this century. With the rise of Keynesianism, however, the primary lesson of the old-time religion ...”

“... young woman”, whereas a lady in her thirties could easily do so’. Authors cannot be held to blame for the boasts of their blurbs. Still, the claim that the professor’s is ‘the first comprehensive critical biography of Jane Austen for half a century’ is presumably licensed by his remark that the ‘last’ detailed critical biography dates ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”