“... justifiably at those who had to wait for Barthes’s later work to realise he was human, but there may be some stragglers still, and this book should help them. Barthes discusses his debts to Sartre and Brecht, and the linguist Benveniste, remembers his early bouts of tuberculosis as hints of what might have been a vocation. The sanatorium, he says, was ‘a ...”

“... don’t especially like car crashes, exploding buildings and the overuse of assault weapons, you may want to stay away from the cinema for a while. Well, you could have started to stay away even before the pandemic, because it often seemed there was nothing else to see, whether the noise and violence involved superheroes or just special agents in suits. But ...”

“... of the events or issues they might indirectly represent. It was quite far-fetched to suggest that Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), say, set in Mexico, was asking us think also of the war in Vietnam. The current season of Sergio Leone films at the British Film Institute, concentrating on his westerns, and especially on the first, A Fistful of ...”

“... where it came from and then try to adumbrate Khamenei’s statement. It’s important because it may be the key to the outcome of the present nuclear negotiations with Iran. Let WSWU be the number of SWUs needed to separate a feed with a percentage of uranium-235 xf – the rest being uranium-238 – into a product with a U-235 percentage xp and a remainder ...”

“... they are as dominant as the logo on a Formula One racing car. The map of Sussex of 1724-25 by Richard Budgen has the arms of no fewer than 184 subscribers, arranged hierarchically. Maps like this were surely a way of building status, items to display rather than use, like the maps that hang on walls in Dutch 17th-century interiors. They make handsome ...”

“... in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard Godfrey suggests in the catalogue that he failed because he could never avoid exaggerating, if only a little). He possessed a combination of technical abilities which no modern caricaturist can match: a good grasp of anatomy, a fine way with drawn drapery ...”

“... many less serious viral infections; there is no quick way of reassuring a patient who suspects he may have the disease. (The BMJ recently carried advice to doctors on a whole new problem – the treatment of anxiety and depression among homosexuals who fear they may have AIDS.) Time alone can tell: but if you have the ...”

“... appeared on page 618; the same letter in the new edition concludes on page 816. Yet those figures may understate the extent of the transformation achieved by the new edition. The earlier edition contained 509 letters by T.S. Eliot, 37 by his first wife, Vivien, and 40 by various others. The new edition adds 195 more letters by Eliot, another 27 by Vivien and ...”

“... details are not entirely accurate – Hans Driesch’s name is consistently misspelled and Richard Dawkins is awarded a Nobel Prize (in what field?) – but Kolata is particularly good at providing accessible explanations of scientific ideas and achievements, and even those who know very little about contemporary biology should be able to follow ...”

“... in the sanctuary of the lavatory, I endeavoured to remove their physical traces. I was born on 5 May 1923, in a London nursing home, which occupied a house in an early 19th-century square. The square, Torrington Square, was destroyed in the war. One side of it still stands as a terrace, but I do not know whether this includes the house where I was born, even ...”

“... I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was willing to admit I belonged. This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration: his mistakes are the ...”

“... truth is that all-out nuclear war is still extraordinarily remote. The West and the Soviet Union may be nearer a conflict, but the odds on its becoming nuclear in the full sense have not changed. The factor of uncertainty that makes it impossible, for instance, to guarantee accurate targeting for even one of Britain or France’s nuclear submarines, let ...”

“... is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of Richard Arkwright. Miss Cracroft from the same year is a tumble of satin and lace; a veil blows from her shoulder and flowers garland her bosom, but despite the mobile stuffs her face is as still, her back as rigid, as Anne Bateman’s. The catalogue suggests ...”

“... 1975, I commented that ‘not only the voyeur and the gossip but the ordinarily sympathetic reader may sense here and there that the whole truth has not been permitted to emerge: dot-dot-dots come at crucial points, where one suspects an editorial decision has been made that certain names shall not be named, certain facts shall not be dragged out into the ...”

“... accustomed to imploding on their microspecialisations than to lifting their eyes to worlds that may, as J.B.S. Haldane famously said, be queerer than we can ever imagine. Nor was much enlightenment to be drawn from a recent TV documentary on genetic engineering (typical of its genre), inevitably beginning with the Nazi eugenics movement and ending with ...”