“... people – what they are like as sources of testimony, whether and in what circumstances they may be trusted.’ Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a gentleman’s agreement: that so-called ...”

“... disputants agree on one single point, namely, that their opponents were all in the wrong.’ It may have been fun, but the disputes took their toll. The problem of vertebrate origins and, more generally, that of the evolutionary relationships of all the animal phyla, were coming to be seen as insoluble; the best young scientists were moving on to other ...”

“... by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.’ Similarly, when he writes in 1932, It is going on. It is going to be like this tomorrow. Attendance-officers will flit from slum to slum, educational ...”

“... on 28 January and 8 February 1779 have always been connected with the joint portrait, but may well have concerned the poet’s courtship of Reynolds’s niece. In any case, Jackson was certain that Bampfylde’s rejection marked ‘the commencement of his madness’, adding that ‘on being refused admittance at Sir Joshua’s he broke the ...”

“... he admired totalitarianism. He was fascinated by its apparent efficiency and its sheer power. One may be forgiven for wondering why Picasso had not lent his support to Franco or to Hitler. Earlier in the book, in need of an international political backdrop, Huffington quotes Paul Johnson’s description (in his book Modern Times) of a party at the Kremlin ...”

“... monastic orders to satisfy her desires. But by allowing anger to vent itself in laughter satire may often be a substitute for, not a summons to, revolution. Rochester’s obscene ‘Satyr on Charles II’ was the work not of a puritan revolutionary but of a privileged fellow libertine, and Private Eye’s fascination with the alleged exploits of ‘Randy ...”

“... what all those co-operative and dutiful civil servants did; even the morally self-confident may be unnerved by the fear that routinised large-scale murder is not very different from much else that goes on in total war. The bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Nagasaki and Hiroshima does nothing to palliate the horrors of the camps, but it ...”

“... chose a biographer from outside his own party, but his and Anthony Howard’s political outlooks may have been closer to each other than Mr Horne’s and Macmillan’s ‘not very good’ Toryisms. After an undistinguished three years at Eton, a first in Mods at Oxford, a flirtation with Rome together with Ronnie Knox, a commission in the Grenadier Guards ...”

“... followed by ‘The Unknown’, a Muse-poem: She is to be kissed Only perhaps by me; She may be seeking Me and no other: she May not exist. Thomas’s dialectic swings between flawed relationship with a fully existing woman, and the distracting ideal who ‘lures a poet’; between domestic compromise and the ...”

“... not lose sight of the universal nature of the problem.’ She concedes that such global sentiments may be of little practical use to a black youth in a dole queue, though perhaps more useful than a doctrine which ‘discourages Blacks and Browns from making essential adjustments [to British society] by laying all the blame for anybody’s lack of success on ...”

“... loyalty’. Benazir’s description of her first meeting with Zia suggests how the Bhuttos may have underestimated him. a short, nervous, ineffectual-looking man whose pomaded hair was parted in the middle and lacquered to his head. He looked more like an English cartoon villain than an inspiring military leader. And he seemed so obsequious, telling ...”

“... dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative world-making, whereas poems, even long poems, usually get us to concentrate firmly on the language and the matter in hand. Proust himself was an expert on this subject, and ...”

“... It may well be that the most interesting literature of this century cannot be subsumed under the broad label of Modernism or be said to have originated in the great literary centres, but was actually the work of outsiders and mavericks, starting with Kafka, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions ...”

“... portrait of Mrs Riddle, tea is represented as a ritual occasion, as part of a feminine rite. It may be that she saw her sitter’s vocation – building a seemly or even an exquisite atmosphere, manipulating the tea things, pouring, arranging her clothing and decor with a sure grasp and a keen aesthetic sense – as an analogue to her own work in painting a ...”

“... and a perimeter fence. There are some, but not many restrictions placed on where the bereaved may bury their dead, although not everything has changed since the days of the old South Africa. Burial plots in ‘D’-grade cemeteries, such as those in Soweto, will cost black working-class families the equivalent of a week’s wages at 110 Rands or 18 ...”