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“... cruelty than with simple sex, an interest they appear to be superseding. Around the same time we read of allegations that the Greek police had been inflicting some form of bastinado on a British woman prisoner. They were said to use this means of persuasion as a matter of course. I suppose that we must remind ourselves of the fact that we live in an age of ...”

“... Gould is the best writer of popular science now active, and this book the most enjoyable I have read for a long time. It has the two essential features of good science writing: it tells me of facts and ideas that are new to me, and it makes me want to argue with the author. Let me first choose some facts, almost at random. Although I am a professional ...”

“... leg of X or the endangered toe of Y, who has already lost a leg? Those are two of the variations Peter Singer puts forward on the exam question that used to ask whether, in a fire of just such severity as to let you rescue one and no more, you would plump for your grandparent, your grandchild or the Titian that so surprisingly shared houseroom with them. His ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end of the Second World War was before my ...”

“... In Britain it was not until the Lady Chatterley trial that ‘the masses’ were permitted to read a work formerly deemed pornographic. The celebrated question posed by the prosecution counsel – ‘would you be willing for your wives or servants to read this book?’ – reminds us of the frisson of Establishment ...”

“... his views had changed. Even so, he is right to say that the best way to learn about science is to read what leading scientists have to say about their subject and in the majority of these essays he proves himself a worthy successor to those whom he praises from his childhood reading. Professor Maynard Smith lays much of the blame for the public ...”

“... have a child I hate children I don’t have a child Jean says she’ll scream.’ ‘Don’t read books about schizophrenia. I want to read books about schizophrenia, especially Laing’s books and the books from Kingsley Hall.’ Yeah, fine, if you must, whatever. ‘Now I’m two people.’ Oh, OK.The art world loved ...”

“... It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic. Joyce relentlessly explicated it, and gave his fans the authorised version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be ...”

“... books. One in Welsh!’ J.M. Barrie, something of an expert on children who never grow up, came to read to them at Glamis. Crawfie was the first of the Windsor grasses – in her native Kilmarnock she would have been called a ‘clype’, a tittle-tattle – but bitter words against the crown tend to come from the royals themselves, not their servants.James VI ...”

“... developed by Orton and Stoppard, cultural despair variously expressed – for instance, by Herbert Read and Kingsley Amis; and then to the sorts of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect Russell, Ayer, Popper etc; he neglects very little. Indeed the quantity of material he doesn’t neglect is ...”

“... on the impact of the outside world on their people rather than the other way round. Even Peter Pulzer’s excellent ‘political history of a minority’ does not quite escape from such introversion. The two Jews whose impact on German politics was the greatest, the founders of the German labour movement, Marx and Lassalle, barely appear (there are ...”

“... attacks her failure to set up an inquiry into the behaviour of security officers who, according to Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, sought to undermine the Wilson premiership. These charges, as Mr Dalyell frames them, have either been denied or brushed aside by Mrs Thatcher or her spokesmen. The evidence on offer is sometimes thin. A not-proven verdict would seem ...”

“... The text of the poem in Jon Stallworthy’s anthology has two misprints: for ‘falling’ read ‘fading’; for ‘The plains’, ‘These plains’. In Fast Forward, Peter Porter meditates persistently on the decline of Classical culture and the threat of nuclear war. What comes of the used-up Mediterranean When ...”

“... which awarded him the Grand Prix d’Or for this book, and the coffee-tables where he is often read. Nonetheless, it is indicative that even in this glossy biography the hero is not so much Napoleon and the military as the civilian bourgeoisie. For it was mainly they, Tulard argues, especially the Notables, who backed Napoleon in 1799 as the only saviour ...”