“... David Bohm and Basil Hiley worked together for twenty years and between them developed a very unusual approach to quantum theory. Bohm died in 1992, but by then the book was almost complete. It is a magnificent monument to one of this century’s finest and most attractive minds. Painfully shy, and finding few fellow physicists willing to give a hearing to his new ideas, Bohm struggled for four decades to get beyond the orthodox views that he had himself defended in his Quantum Theory of 1951, long the subject’s standard textbook, but which later put him in mind of Escher’s Waterfall, whose careful construction cannot hide the fact that the water must at some stage be flowing uphill ...”

“... murky water. Only after the eye has traversed this organic equivalent of a ditchful of barbed wire may it enter the paradise beyond. The other way in which Constable’s land is more factual than Claude’s is that the human action which goes on there in the open has to do with horny-handed toil rather than the pursuit of love or war. So the reigning calm and ...”

“... professional psychologists or to rely on one’s own unchallenged assumptions. These assumptions may in fact prove generally adequate, yet in the case of the French Revolution the extraordinary passions released by the event do not seem wholly intelligible without more rigorous psychological analysis. What is one to make of the 22-year-old Saint-Just holding ...”

“... labour which produced them than in the desire they arouse. In ‘The Prussian Officer’ (written May-June 1913), the scar on a young orderly’s thumb drives his superior to distraction. ‘And the next day he had to use all his will-power to avoid seeing the scarred thumb. He wanted to get hold of it and – a hot flame ran in his blood.’ The scar is the ...”

“... state is treating stupidity not as an evil but as a valuable commodity, the production of which may be encouraged in order to increase revenue, as though stupidity were a good in its own right. There is no attempt here, as there is in the case of cigarettes, to balance the amount of money raised against the merits of the behaviour which allows the money to ...”

“... into shooting’, makes one very curious as to whether some of the film’s final portentousness may be the responsibility of Wenders rather than Shepard. Like William Carlos Williams, Shepard came and took a hard look at Europe, then turned his back on it. He remains resolutely a Redskin. His achievement has been to avoid the naivety and macho ...”

“... I would not have believed you.’ Since X. is younger, and stronger, than the chambermaid, one may hope that he, rather than she, represents Poland’s ...”

“... also rather astonishing to read that ‘the Hagana had no policy of driving out Arabs’ before 15 May, since the northern commander of the Hagana, General Allon, has described how, before that date, he ‘cleaned’ the Galilee of ‘tens of thousands of sulky Arabs’. The book has been carefully crafted to avoid charges of bias, and its supporters will ...”

“... Birkenhead’s rise seems less attractive, and his decline more pathetic, than ever before. He may have been the architect of his own advance, but he was also smith of his own misfortune. Like Lord Campbell’s earlier Lord Chancellors, there was ‘a sort of romance’ about him. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Lord Birkenhead’s ...”

“... there with unparalleled richness and range of illustration. You see every human type, and may eavesdrop on some of the most deeply emotional moments in people’s lives: separations and reunions of spouses and sweethearts, soldiers off to fight in distant wars, families off to start a new life in the Dominions, honeymoon couples off to ... whatever ...”

“... of leading readers into a sentimental mood, the opening trap-doors beneath them. Literary critics may challenge some of Craig’s readings, indeed the way he reads, making relatively straightforward links backwards and forwards between life and art Historians, while recognising his erudition and individual insights, will question some of his broad ...”

“... tomorrow.’ The underlying profundity of this remark is a reminder that, while Shaw’s ideas may have begun as jokes, they didn’t end there. In his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Shaw advocated wages for housework, a slogan which (along with Black Power) was to express a political truth in utopian form more than forty years later. The ...”

“... Europe needs that form of interconnectedness which rests on genuine connections. Hobbes may have been wrong about a lot of things, including the incompatibility of sovereignty and federal government, but he was right when he said that the union of a multitude requires nothing more than that they should be represented as though one. What Swedes and ...”

“... Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his rebellious heir to Bayonne, where he forced them both to abdicate in favour of his own brother Joseph. He counted on his troops already in the Peninsula to enforce the transition, but faced insurrections in numerous ...”

“... free lee-gal ad-vice-ah’. Who is the joke on here? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the ride. It may be that the reason all this works is that Dylan is Dylan, and simply hearing him do something as mundane as spinning a few records and reading out a couple of emails exerts its own magnetic pull. But radio can make the most interesting people sound boring if ...”