“... It will be seen that these horrible facts are absolutely fundamentally unacceptable. They may win their authors a Nobel Prize, but those who discuss the mind know that something is seriously wrong. Sperry reappears on the scene to make matters worse. In a series of experiments, he examined the apparent mosaic representation of the world in a ...”

“... time I was working, one floor below his, in collaboration with his formidable ideological critic Richard Lewontin – the second of the remarkable triumvirate who inhabit the Museum (the third, in the basement, is Stephen Jay Gould). Lewontin claims that when the conflict between them was at its most intense, Wilson wouldn’t even get into the lift between ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The rummager among old books has done his bit again. Warton may have been Camden Professor of History at Oxford when he knew Malone, but he seems to have been quite happy in his role as under-labourer. He is often sent scuttling off to the Bodleian by his ambitious ‘friend’. He seems to relish being asked, say, to ...”

“... artists inevitably construct and invent their representations of American experience, whatever we may mean by this vague, polymorphous concept, rather than simply revealing a pre-existing entity through a transparent lens. The metaphor is misleading from the start. Certainly, Hughes’s project cannot be faulted on the basis of coverage: it starts out with ...”

“... of the external letters which the editor includes. It was written by his wife Catherine to Richard Hengist Horne, a rather rackety literary man, author of the forgotten epic ‘Orion’, who had been a friend of the young Meredith; and it describes, with that striking domestic vividness of which even the most commonplace Victorians seem to have been ...”

“... the Cold War and, in a dig at Bush, for his ability to govern without partisan rancour. In 1985 Richard Reeves published The Reagan Detour, a book aimed at fellow Democrats who were disheartened by Reagan’s stunning victory in the 1984 election. He assured his readers that Reaganism would be short-lived: Americans still supported Social Security, they ...”

“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”

“... secular verse. Guest concentrates exclusively on Smart as a religious poet, in fact, and it may be a sign of our current lack of confidence in literary ‘greatness’ that ‘the ambition and significance’ of his achievement are eventually defined in a context of mid-18th-century religious preoccupations. Making clear the contemporary issues at stake ...”

“... have especially interesting lives, but because any life is an allegory of all the others and ‘may serve to reassure, comfort, thwart ambition, reconcile the reader to the pain and frustration he has previously believed were reserved for him alone’. When we see this life as randy, bohemian, hung over, haunted by the pop songs of the epoch, plagued by ...”

“... to point out how starkly each differed from the other in its view of the state. The columnist Richard Reeves predicted in February that the contest for the Presidency would be decided by a single issue: what Americans think of the President’s statement that ‘government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.’ This would be, he ...”

“... Mighty prophets like Gerrard Winstanley (a bankrupt cloth merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ...”

“... large numbers of leading intellectuals, from, say, Herbert Spencer through H.G. Wells and on to Richard Hoggart and beyond, exhibited no such consanguinity.However, even if many of the more sweeping generalisations about the social homogeneity of intellectuals in Britain prove on closer inspection to be false, it remains true that some families do appear to ...”

“... individual and communal well-being. The evidentiary base began to expand enormously. Darwin may be seen as the beginning of a tradition – progressive and uncensorious – that construes sex as a natural phenomenon. Sir Patrick Geddes and J.A. Thomason’s popular volume, The Evolution of Sex, and Havelock Ellis’s massive Studies in the Psychology of ...”

“... he was courting new friends, including Maud Gonne, and writing a few reviews. According to Richard Ellmann, William too was offered a job at this time, but turned it down because it was on a Unionist newspaper. Jack was at art college. At the end of that year, Lily took a job with William Morris’s daughter, ...”