“... I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.’ Mandela may be released soon. If so, a new biography, with his full co-operation, may be possible. Fatima Meer’s book is full of interest, but it is not worthy of the man: it stops and starts several times, is full of gaps and ...”

“... further stimulates the industry of producing statistics and the work of arguing about what they may mean. Hacking insists that the nation states’ massive reliance on numbers was the necessary precondition for advances in statistical theory. Modern industrial society was the only platform from which the new style of reasoning could have emerged. It is ...”

“... a twin ticket is retained. The number of actual carpet coupons for the block is four: a block may contain sixty flats. Once all the tickets are distributed, there is a draw and the lucky ones get the coupons. Then the market takes over. Those who get the coupons and do not want a carpet get on the phone to make deals with those who do – or who know a ...”

“... rallyin’, rippin’ an’ choppin’ an’ burnin’ is obviously terribly good stuff. Socialism may have disappeared from the agenda but the onward march of the masses seems to be still in full spate, very much as depicted in those giant Socialist Realist murals which the Eastern masses are now, some-what less progressively, tearing down. But the way ahead ...”

“... lecture, that ‘it is valuable to understand the poetry of the 17th century, in order that we may understand that of our own time and understand ourselves’ was one for which, in 1926, there was a fit audience, even though few. But how to go about understanding it in just this way – that is, with a view to understanding ourselves (scil. the mess we’d ...”

“... power source and as a way of protecting young German physicists from the call-up. However, in May 1940 Weiszäcker realised that the plutonium generated in such a pile could easily be separated from the uranium and would be suitable as an explosive, and sent a report to that effect to the Army Ordnance Department. Heisenberg, on the other hand, felt sure ...”

“... pay and other benefits from work were lower.) The official American poverty line, $12,195 a year, may be adequate for keeping ‘a deer-hunting, bass-fishing, nutria-trapping, vegetable-gardening man’ and his wife and two children not unhappily alive by the Alabama River. But it’s no good in a city, and the average – which on Luttwak’s figures for all ...”

“... the vodkas, saying how pointless and infuriating it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to ...”

“... about it: in a Borrowdale climbing hut the other day I found the handwritten note of what may have been their last mountain walk in England, in the same logbook as my eldest son’s record of some of his first hard routes. This long tradition (it starts with Coleridge’s tense letter describing his downclimbing of Broad Stand on Scafell in ...”

“... relegation of the topic to the relatively safe domain of metaphor is part of a tendency which may be seen in other writers, whether or not for similar reasons. Freudian discussions, so far as I know, do not normally raise the question of whether the use of cannibal metaphors might be implicated in a deep cultural reticence about the literal deed. In ...”

“... the edge of one wall. The doctor herself, when out on her rounds, a lonely figure on a night call, may – like others of her colleagues – be assaulted, or even killed, for the contents of her black bag. One of the sixty or so GPs interviewed by Gathorne-Hardy remembers practice in the East End of Glasgow in the Twenties: At night, walking through the slums ...”

“... writing is nominally a review, preferring to concentrate on her own paraphrase and such points as may arise from it. So compulsively tendentious is her approach to creative literature at this time that when she announces her intention of reviewing a certain ‘anti-feminist thesis’ one assumes it is going to be a novel or a play, only to discover with ...”

“... theory: if Cobbett comes out with something illiberal, unscientific or backward-looking, he may be excused and the blame put on the primitive age in which he lived. There is, of course, something patronising about this. He was ‘the last great tribune of the agrarians’, wrote G.D.H. Cole, and, ‘by force of circumstances, also the first great ...”

“... quality and outlook, much to be valued in a land which had long been looking for a voice. This may well be so, though one would hate to be called on to identify a Canadian joke. Leacock said he would rather have written Alice in Wonderland than the Encyclopedia Britannica, but there were sixth-formers (of whom this reviewer was one) who would rather have ...”

“... and yet, as Luria says, they are of the most fundamental importance, so much so that they may demand a new sort of neurology, a ‘romantic science’, as he liked to call it. Luria thought a science of this kind would be best introduced by a story – a detailed case-history of man with a profound right-hemisphere disturbance, a case-history which ...”