“... in the use of condoms from 30 per cent to 70 per cent. Although only 2 per cent of British males said that they had had sex with a man in the past year, 40 per cent admitted to homosexual inclinations experienced exclusively before the age of 18. This suggests that bisexual play in adolescence is very common, but steady and exclusive homosexual practice in ...”

“... convenience. Its methodology is lies. An atmospheric scientist once told me that he had checked Edward Teller’s projections of the amount of fallout that would reach Americans during the years of above-ground nuclear testing in southern Nevada. The great genius had somehow left off some zeros, reducing the impact a hundred or a thousandfold, while other ...”

“... as ‘behaviourism’ was at the peak of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson, behaviourism rejected explanations of action in terms of mysterious inner processes such as ‘thought’ and tried to explain behaviour purely in terms of the organism’s conditioning by experience. By the ...”

“... Bends, which I came across when I was researching an engraving after the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh, made some twenty-odd years before Telford began his work. According to Telford, the Irish politicians summoned to Westminster several times a year ‘dreaded’ the part of the journey that lay through North Wales. The stretch of the old road about ...”

“... epilepsy, hypnosis and other twilight states of consciousness in which the accused was said to be legally ‘absent’. Mad-Doctors in the Dock recapitulates elements of both, and of the work that undergirds the whole project, Nigel Walker’s Crime and Insanity in England, Vol. I (1968). Although it breaks less fresh ground than its ...”

“... In my teens​ I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who lived two buses away and went to a different school ...”

“... unions in economic terms. Neither Harold Wilson’s Labour Administration, nor the Europhile Tory, Edward Heath, was capable of arresting national drift and decay. But then, at last, a saviour emerged. Like other saviours, she was an outsider, but all the more powerful for that. ‘I have only recently become a Conservative,’ declared Keith Joseph, one of ...”

“... appeared. ‘“We want to create the conditions for an Epic of Gilgamesh for the Ruthenes,” said the Professor. I tried not to gape, while he eyed me shrewdly and sipped his whisky, sure of his effect.’ I felt a bit like Thompson on reading the startlingly terse note which presents The Spirit of the Age. There the reader is informed that this is ‘an ...”

“... of most potent onions, Uncle Tom Cobbleighest winners as far as the eye can see. It ought to be said in fairness that the book is not wholly devoted to the documentation of humanity’s urge to compete in irrational undertakings. Much of it consists of presumably useful information on the wonders of nature and the fabrications of the engineer; if you want ...”

“... Road, Chelsea’ without adding for the benefit of pilgrims that, although The Vale is often said to have been a cul-de-sac in the Nineties, it hasn’t been one for (at the estimate of an erudite present-day resident, Sir Edward Playfair) the last six or seven decades. More than human influence is at work, however, in ...”

“... Commonwealth as of little more than sentimental value. But there are those who suspect that, had Edward Heath shown more enthusiasm and a more comradely spirit at those Commonwealth Conferences over which he presided as premier, things might have turned out differently. Nevertheless, it is no small matter that, although wars between members of the ...”

“... were the target. We bought it.   Back in New York we showed the picture to Panofsky and he said it was of the ‘School of Arcimboldo’. When Alfred did the Surrealism show, he put in a lot of peculiar and enigmatic pictures from previous centuries to accelerate the public’s acceptance of Surrealism. The most important thing about the pictures of ...”

“... from Lydda and Ranila, two towns that were inconviently close to Tel Aviv. Some of his men, he said, refused to take part in the expulsion: ‘Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these [men] and explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action.’ But this passage no longer ...”

“... Byron’s mistress, not on Milord, but on Shelley during that last summer:     It was said that in his adolescence he was good-looking – but now he was no longer so. His features were delicate but not regular – except for his mouth which however was not good when he laughed, and was a little spoiled by his teeth ... He was also extraordinary ...”

“... one or two people in the audience mew to themselves. He would also appreciate something my mother said. My brother had gone to Athens. She was asked where he was but could not remember. ‘It begins with an A,’ she said. ‘Oh, I know. Abroad.’ I am abroad writing this in another place beginning with A, America. He ...”