“... and among the answers to Einstein’s remark about God not playing dice is one from Joseph Ford: ‘He does, but they are loaded.’ Gleick and Regis both tell their stories using the common science writer’s mix of biographical sketch, exposition and quotation. They are lucky to have such stories, and readers are lucky that they tell them so ...”

“... Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting ...”

“... pages (pages 170-74) to the whole of Jacobean drama, brusquely dismissing Webster and Jonson and Ford, not even mentioning Middleton – except to dismiss The Revenger’s Tragedy, which he continues to misattribute to Tourneur – apparently as uninterested in the last two decades of textual scholarship as he is in the first two decades of 17th-century ...”

“... defence cuts, withdraw from Nato etc. The possibilities seemed so grim that at one point President Ford was even induced to turn the sound down on a Washington-Minnesota football match he was watching on TV. It was fortunate for Britain that individuals in the State Department and the President’s entourage should have so exaggerated the likely consequences ...”

“... 1950s (Every Day except Christmas, for example, about Covent Garden market, was paid for by the Ford Motor Company, who stipulated that Anderson wasn’t to show any General Motors lorries), the tension between working for the establishment and resisting it is always present in Anderson’s work; and Anderson himself exemplifies that tension. He was born in ...”

“... 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives’. And yet in the interim a feeling had arisen that the imaginary worlds ...”

“... Ryder, a long novel which included a veiled attack on her father. She met Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Man Ray, Brancusi. She and Thelma slotted in neatly with the American expats Stein called the ‘Lost Generation’. Thelma was lost and losing it more and more. Her life with Barnes (or Robin Vote’s life ...”

“... All flesh is grass, said Peter the Apostle. In the United States, a calf runs the range for less than a year before going to a crowded feed-lot. It is treated with hormones to promote weight gain. Both there and in Britain the beast is likely to be drenched with antibiotics to keep down diseases and to promote further weight gain ...”

“... Governments of the big EEC states, Japan and Australia. The course of events is ably outlined by Peter Carey in the tightly-packed text that accompanies the grim pictures taken in 1991 by the courageous British photographer Steve Cox. No anti-colonial guerrilla resistance had developed in this remote outpost of empire when the Salazarist dictatorship ...”

“... as the underlying phrase ‘Because I say so.’ He’s not keeping bad company. It’s clear that Peter Greenaway makes films in the same sort of way, imposing sets of rules on himself before he constructs a narrative or creates character (if he ever gets round to that). Peter Reading has taken a similar tack in his ...”

“... to Roddy Ho, Slough House’s resident tech expert, who is inordinately proud of his ‘D-reg Ford Kia’, a non-existent, impossible car (it might as well have been a 1986 VW Honda), which the other slow horses are as quick to make fun of as they are to commandeer, and is perhaps Herron’s way of making fun of the kind of thriller that takes pains to ...”

“... Gaia and a view in which organisms have very little effect on the planet. When the biologist Ford Doolittle criticised earlier versions of Gaia, Lovelock replied: ‘What he and other evolutionists seem to ignore is the fact that the presence and the products of life inevitably and inexorably modify the environment.’ Whether or not some biologists did ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... For us​ ,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above all, planned lines ...”

“... true that some modern art has imitated the primitive energy, the folk spells, of graffiti. Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters, a quarterly ‘journal of the fine arts’, launched last spring, challenges many of the fashionable practices and assumptions which I have just reviewed. At first, its opponents in the art world said it wouldn’t last, then ...”