“... astray, goading him to stay up late, crunching across the grass wearing his Neverland drag: ‘snow-globe deely boppers, a mantle of tinsel and gauntlets and greaves/of kitchen foil’. ‘Help me,’ he pleads with Jackself, ‘keep everything just as it is.’ But he can’t, and it won’t. Four poems later, Wren will be dead. What began as a game ...”

“... contributions to the Vienna Society, backed up by this memoir so ably edited and reconstructed by Edward Timms, make possible a reconsideration of some of the most contentious issues in psychoanalysis: the problem of the ‘problem of women’, and the disappearance of the idea of sexual liberation. And indeed the question of why sexuality should be so easily ...”

“... tour there is always a pest who asks questions. What, he wonders, are the colleges like today? Did Snow give an accurate account of Christ’s? What about the way Nevill Mott was treated as master of Caius that led to his resignation? What of the delectable days of Lord Dacre in the Lodge at Peterhouse? Surely space could have been found to praise the ...”

“... Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an undemocratic state ...”

“... reader of novels. He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I didn’t. ‘Try The Counterlife,’ Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom said ...”

“... London) mansion. But, in the midst of the festivities, the doorbell rings, and there in the snow stands Sir Edward Fonsett, a distinguished psychiatrist, who has come to retrieve Mir (whom he reveals to be not a psychoanalyst, but an immensely rich butcher) and take him back to the mental hospital from which he has ...”

“... all over … Our life here. The monastic life in England.’ Puzzles and deaths drift up like the snow that eventually transforms Scarnsea into a locked-room setting familiar from the ‘golden age’ of crime mysteries. Dissolution also owes much to The Name of the Rose, though Umberto Eco’s glum postscript (‘Very little is discovered and the detective ...”

“... about this essentially nice man, and I felt a little guilty about apparently having started this snow into action.’ As to the Bennites, his strictures are unanswerable and all that has happened in the last three years has confirmed them. Even now, their delusions still appear almost unbelievable, and I do not suppose Johnson would wish to change a word. As ...”

“... communication tunnels) as the tunnel which was promoted in the late 19th century by Edward Watkin of the Southeastern Railway Company and his partner and engineer, William Low. Despite the success of the great Alpine tunnels – Saint-Gotthard, Simplon, Mont Cenis – it is doubtful that Watkin and Low could have succeeded with their project of ...”

“... he becomes engrossed in electrical experiments and succeeds in turning his brother (‘Uncle Edward’) into the chime of the front-door bell. Other characters constantly appear and disappear, though in less radical fashion, throughout both books. They include the narrator’s ineffectual and inconsequential mother, the assistants in the store who are ...”

“... with alacrity. Passionately sceptical of conventional medical developments – he denounced Edward Jenner’s idea of vaccination as a mere ‘stunt’ which was ‘nothing short of attempted murder’ – he was prepared to believe, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say adopt, the ludicrous ideas of Dr Jaeger. To celebrate the death of his ...”

“... of science and an attack on ‘literary intellectuals’ by the now almost forgotten C.P. Snow; unjustly forgotten, because his ponderous novels about hope, power and prestige tell us much about the public and academic life of his period. In a sense the debate was about the 1930s, the scientists’ age of glory and the disappointed ...”

“... attempted to keep warm at a broken stove. The washing facilities amounted to a bucket of thawed snow. Buber-Neumann was eventually assigned to a flea-infested barracks where she had only an old wooden door to sleep on, and was given the job of keeping a statistical record of the daily performance of tractors. When she asked for her case to be reopened, she ...”

“... career was concerned (he took up the first of a series of distinguished chairs, the John Edward Taylor Professorship of English at Manchester, the following year), and a book of that sort was more widely reviewed in those days than it would be now. But was the publication of that short book, largely about the Romantic roots of modernist poetry and ...”

“... her sixties, her imagination was deeply invested in the arrangement of domestic space. Though Mrs Edward (Teddy) Wharton began her married life in a ‘cottage’ on her mother’s Newport estate, a substantial legacy from a millionaire cousin in the late 1880s assured that none of her future drawing-rooms would belong to her mother. Codman worked with ...”