“... of the son’s avant-gardism. Having gone for a prevailing, historically appropriate black-and-white, Reitz himself is avant-garde enough to fleck the film with colour as a heightening for critical moments. In the context of the film at large, however, these dabs and flecks could be thought an alien feature – caviare to the general, Stockhausen to the ...”

“... ago: we wouldn’t even have been able to distinguish a modern digital signal from background white noise. SETI is maintained, nevertheless, in the hope that we will receive transmissions we can recognise as such. The account of SETI in XTL (a zippy acronym for Extra-Terrestrial Life) is more technically detailed, and lacks Jack&Ian’s scepticism. But ...”

“... Blanchard Jerrold asserted in 1883, alongside ‘The Association for the Total Suppression of White Hats! The Anti-Flower-in-the-Button-Hole League! The Society for the Abolition of Green-Tea Drinking! The Association for the Restriction of Glove Fastenings to One Button! The Local Option Snuff Confederation!’ – and Durbach is forced to admit that ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous ...”

“... Russia and yet Nemtsov had a full tan. Everywhere we went he wore blue jeans, a black jacket and a white shirt with the top three buttons undone. He addressed everyone he met with the familiar ty, which was rude, and he hit on all the women journalists. But he was totally committed to what he was doing, and bizarrely, bull-headedly, fearless. By this point he ...”

“... lurking sadness in this volume, in spite of its many displays of verbal energy. Both Harrison and Peter Symes, who worked with him on a number of these pieces, insist quite rightly that the films are the thing, the texts ‘a poor substitute’, in Symes’s words, ‘for seeing them and hearing them’. I hate to ask why we could not have the films ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... the ground was Bride Caskey, and Claffey was on top of her. He saw that Claffey’s buttocks were white, and meagre in form though energetic in action, and that the woman’s eyes were closed and that she was bleeding from her mouth. Her kerchief was pulled off her head and laid beside her, lifting in the wind; the merest inch was trapped beneath the boot of ...”

“... it caused Oliver St John Gogarty to sue for libel. (Kavanagh had written: ‘I mistook Gogarty’s white-robed maid for his wife – or his mistress. I expected every poet to have a spare wife.’) In 1939, having decided to leave Inniskeen for good, he moved to Dublin, and for the rest of his life earned a shaky living as a journalist. He published the ...”

“... And then it begins … on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out across the roof of the sky. No moon at all … And no sound, but for the discontinuous trickle of water, the muted patter of cheap tennis sneakers on the ghostly surface of the road and the sustained applause of the crickets. On a ...”

“... involved, among other things, a little larceny and a little prostitution, and hanging out with Peter Rachman in London. The narrator also knows Rachman, and indeed visits a number of his properties with him. We see a memorable series of snapshots of broken-down flats and houses, the battered London equivalent of the shabby Paris immeubles Modiano so ...”

“... and guidelines that determine what research is approved. Thanks to the clinical ethics movement, white-coated bioethicists work in hospitals and medical schools – advising doctors and nurses, writing notes on patients’ charts. Bioethicists serve as consultants to managed care organisations, advisers to non-profit medical foundations, and expert witnesses ...”

“... dropsy. There were further indignities. In 1810, a menagerie owner called Mr Brookes imported a ‘white camel’ to Britain. The beast was a ‘novelty’ in London, but Brookes wanted it to be ‘still more novel’ and ‘caused it to be artificially spotted and produced it to the public as a camelopard’. (The fraud was discovered by some ‘scientific ...”

“... from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader, and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.’ This is Gibbon’s description of the murder of the mathematician and ...”