“... to do a little background research. It was super-easy to find things out. I went online and read about Balaklava. It wasn’t long before I put ‘Lord Raglan’ into a search engine and soon I was listening to an 1890 recording of Tennyson intoning ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. I was able to read the words ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking contrast to hers in both form and content. Serra is Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog exemplified in heavy metal: Louise Bourgeois is the fox, an artist of many devices, to borrow a Homeric epithet which suits her perfectly ...”

“... had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit that Richard Branson is the first citizen of choice, according to opinion polls, for the unavailable post of president of UK plc. If boosterism and gee-whizzery were Leadbeater’s only faults, I would wish him luck and pass his book to the Oxfam shop. In normal ...”

“... personality in various interludes and ‘interchapters’. He is, he admits, no Holmesian (Richard, not Sherlock) ‘pursuer’ of his subject. But he offers a vivid account of a visit he made to Kensal Green Cemetery as he began work on his biography. It was December (the month in which the novelist died): Thackeray’s grave on the south side, where ...”

“... scrutiny. There are many stilted passages in the Voice series (e.g. when Orwell turns to Herbert Read and asks, ‘Read, will you read us a bit of your autobiography’) and – a black-mark for a talks producer – he allows L.A.G. Strong to use ‘infer’ when he means ...”

“... Is he like other men?’ His apostles made sure that Newton’s compatriots, not all of whom read Latin and few of whom could follow the proofs, were properly in awe of his mathematical analysis of the motion of bodies on Earth and in Heaven. Halley, for one, pulled no punches. Forget about Moses and the Ten Commandments, the inventors of writing or the ...”

“... at any level from the molecular to the cellular to the entire organism and its behaviour. Richard Dawkins extended its definition by asserting that the dam a beaver builds is part of its phenotype.) Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... before, when they were both eleven, and who now ran a tea plantation in Java, proposed by letter. Richard Turpin, on the other hand, had the advantage of being present in the flesh, and after a six-week acquaintance duly ousted the tea planter. Turpin was gay, which made for a tepid courtship on both sides. ‘Molly had been converted to Catholicism by ...”

“... utterly irrational rage. I shall not repeat here the uncouth popular idiom which says as much ... [Richard] Hofstadter himself acquired the dogma from such ‘Frankfurt School’ followers of avowed arch-conspirator Georg Lukacs and the sometime OSS and CIA agent, sometime Communist, and active conspirator Herbert Marcuse, who used to begin his lectures with ...”

“... a clear debt of influence to the chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde. It was based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, a leftist notorious for his risqué subject matter, and as one of the first pieces of chamber music to try to tell a story it riled the more conservative wing of the Viennese critical establishment. In the poem, a woman confesses to her lover that ...”

“... them at all. This gloomy picture of political decline will come as a surprise to those who have read any of the recent books attacking the religious right. At least half a dozen of these have appeared from major publishers in the last year: the list includes polemics by the likes of Kevin Phillips as well as alarmed reporting by American journalists like ...”

“... Richard Pipes, Russian historian at Harvard and sometime member of President Reagan’s National Security Council, is famous for his hatred of Communism. He doesn’t like Russia much, either. Nor does he particularly care for most Russia and Soviet experts, regarding them as given to romanticising and whitewashing their subject ...”

“... of a donnish party. It is even with a sense of wonder, rather than complete horror, that we read of his frankly appalling fantasies of mass murder: the dream of sitting on the rooftops, neatly unhooking the sharp-edged slates and aiming them at the necks of anonymous passers-by ‘until the air was full of their silly heads, flying around as thick as ...”

“... the Brezhnev regime were becoming too flagrant to be ignored. The Soviet top brass were forced to read the offending document and digest its message. The death of Brezhnev saved her and her colleagues from further harassment. The new Secretary for Agriculture, brought into the Politburo by Andropov, was Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she had met in 1982 as a member ...”