“... gives the impression that, necessary though his ideological alliance with the molecular biologists may be, he is uncomfortable with their disregard for the richness and biodiversity of the living world. Molecular biologists after all only recognise the existence of five species out of the ten million or so that inhabit the globe: rats, fruit flies, nematode ...”

“... or invent transgressively butch symbols. Despite such signs that the shiftiness of the material may swamp her purposes, Rand now engages in a climactic tug of war. Can the desirable doll be wrested from Mattel for political ends? Can she be bad enough to become counterculturally good? Yes and no. Essex Hemphill’s poem ‘Soft Targets’, about the black ...”

“... economic liberalisation very directly: at the next opportunity, a majority of the electorate may decide to vote for go-slow Communists, or even hardline Stalinists – though even they could only stop further privatisations, not reverse the process. The political threat is real enough, but in purely economic terms the conventional wisdom is all wrong. To ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what the Front can do about its bugbears: immigration, crime, bad government and corruption. They may fall flat on their faces. Jacques Bompard, the new Mayor of Orange, hardly inspired confidence when he proclaimed that the country has gone back to the Middle Ages and so his citizens must be protected in medieval ways – with barriers around the town which ...”

“... that is soft at the centre. The Irish-Australians and the Catholics in Keneally’s novels may be larrikins, they may be faulty and flawed, but none of them is ever mean at the core. One can never say the same for the non-Irish and the non-Catholic. Nevertheless, Keneally’s lapses are redeemed and overshadowed by ...”

“... out of his niggling, pumped-up disputes with Hardy’s other biographers. And for all I know, he may even be right in some of them; we can never really be sure what went on inside Max Gate. Hardy was notoriously self-protective, destroying Emma’s diaries, ghosting his own biography, keeping his heart out of his letters. Seymour-Smith’s insistence on ...”

“... of their town. The second day was worse – perhaps the worst day of John Williams’s life. He may have understood his own significance to his captors; he was an important man, respected in his community and throughout New England. He could be exchanged for some prisoner valuable to the French; but why these innocents, these babies and women? What use were ...”

“... in the cinema with which Sennett opens could be interpreted in the opposite way: the audience may have flinched from the sight of a mechanical hand because they were still able to feel for someone who had suffered such a loss, despite the ‘gory war epic’ they had just sat through. Realistic film imagery of victims sometimes corresponds, in ...”

“... to make their pieces sound ‘right’. An empirical modal understanding of harmonic coherence may possibly be the only true common language of 20th-century music, as vital to Britten as (appearances notwithstanding) to Boulez, shared by Messiaen and Maxwell Davies. This is not perhaps to say much; but it is clear that the French school, going back at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... utter the profound Post-Modern truth that ‘Politics is showbiz for ugly people.’ Yes, you too may be a mediocre, flaky-scalped, pudgy sycophant. But, with the right ‘skills’, you also can possess a cellular phone and keep a limo on call and ‘take meetings’ and issue terse directives like ‘I want this yesterday, understand.’ Unfortunately, the ...”

“... out in Majorca along with a Spanish grandee, not the marrying kind, so that her hostess may the more easily entertain her newly arrived lover, an English lord. Rumours? There’s a duke’s daughter who may be turning into a man, and there’s somebody who is ‘marrying a man with no legs and two wives’. It ...”

“... weakens boosting, and the gas it turns into, helium-3, absorbs neutrons. Eventually, boosting may fail so badly that the most destructive part of a hydrogen bomb – its ‘secondary’ – fails to ignite. Published figures suggest that if this were to happen in a modern, miniaturised warhead, its yield, or explosive force, could be reduced to less than ...”

“... in A Spell of Winter, transposed a notch in Talking to the Dead); and the related death that may or may not have been murder. Both novels are cramped by the country house and by the agoraphobic woman self-imprisoned there. The reader is glad to come up for fresh air on leaving such claustrophobic narrative ...”