“... you want to see or interact with – perhaps a second or two later. So, for example, your phone may be kept for longer in the high-energy state in which there is a dedicated radio channel open between it and a mobile phone mast.Digital advertising firms also embed tracking code in websites and in the software packages they provide to developers of mobile ...”

“... have been willing to believe the claims she makes for herself as a conviction politician: they may regard her political apprenticeship as irremediably narrow-minded and hard-faced, but they accept her account as essentially true. In the Grantham of the Thirties, however, reporter Anderson regarded the flaunting of such qualities as hard work, thrift and ...”

“... picture under there waiting to be revealed. What I’ve always said about life itself. We may scrape and spit and dab and rub, until the point when we declare that the truth stands plain before us ... Look no fly-shit! But it isn’t so! It’s just my word against everybody else’s. As in all Barnes’s books, wit and readability carry the day: the ...”

“... suicide at Mayerling in 1889, but had been murdered by foreign agents. Brook-Shepherd thinks she may have done this to bolster the efforts of a loony monarchist group who wanted the Pope to canonise her late husband. By this time she was in her nineties, though, and hardly to be blamed. Naturally frugal, she enjoyed imposing frugality on others. Her devoted ...”

“... critics to mention Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, and call her a ‘born writer’, whatever that may mean. This one makes such praise hard to understand. It is a competent family saga of a familiar kind. Jack is the standard-model wild novelist, Sarah is determined to ‘keep her painting self intact’, and gets help from a German refugee art teacher who ...”

“... is paid are, in the words of the subtitle, ‘interpreters of our cultural tradition’. It may be stretching a point to include Lord Leverhulme in that category. The preservation of the cultural tradition costs money, and Leverhulme had lots and used it honourably, recognising that nature and art are ‘needs of the mind’. Soap ads and drawings of ...”

“... light on the probable African love affair, notes that Haggard had a Jewish grandmother (which may have contributed to his racial attitudes), and uncovers the identity of Haggard’s great love. Higgins’s attitude to his subject, unfortunately, is more that of a hobbyist than a critical biographer: he proudly relates how he tracked down Haggard’s old ...”

“... town of Forli to sabotage the war effort, he was sent to prison for five months. His Socialism may not have had any deep philosophical base, but neither was it always merely theoretical. Yet when a million Italians took to the streets in ‘Red Week’ in June 1914, and Mussolini himself saw revolution awaiting only some dramatic event such as the death of ...”

“... imagery, poetry, metaphysics and art of the day. Well, we are all able to make a quantum jump and may share with Heisenberg his uncertainty. But this is a mere borrowing of words. A concern with abstraction, release from convention, a re-examination of orthodoxy – these can be encountered on both sides. But in the absence of a researched attempt to explore ...”

“... kiss and a lump of chocolate for Hugo for being able to walk. Please God he never has to march. May It’s all very green down here at the moment – lots of wild flowers and lots of your gumtrees with their barks hanging down like tattered lingerie. I saw a stork flying and heard a lark singing as though he were over Goodwood racecourse on that wonderful ...”

“... superiority of Indo-European-speaking peoples linger on. The Aryan warlords in their chariots may be out of fashion, but the latest dogma, which Bernal calls the ‘Model of Autochthonous Origin’, is a modified Aryan model. It postulates that the inhabitants of Greece have been speaking Indo-European languages ever since the beginning of the ...”

“... the father is not the question. This scene seems to prove Freud right in his father-theory, but it may just show that Jung is obtuse, or even that Freud would be likely to faint if any theory he held were seriously contested. The other theory that gets quite an outing in the film is that represented by Jung’s denial of coincidence. He has various ...”

“... is certainly a sad situation, but perhaps not quite so uniquely awful as the film suggests, and we may be tempted to cook up our own version of a brutal remark the star himself makes to his estranged wife. ‘I’m unhappy,’ she says. ‘So are millions of other people,’ he glumly responds. But then neither he nor we are those millions, our unhappiness is ...”

“... it turns out, actually wants to meet his maker. A later implication is that the creature may not have been interested in spreading his genes, only in testing some noxious experimental liquid that his species had developed on a planet safely distant from its own home. Still, the firm is clear about the evidence. The DNA of the dead people in this ...”

“... of the early 1920s. Price levels in January 1946 were more than five trillion times those of May 1941. The exchange rate for the gold sovereign in the autumn of 1944, shortly after the liberation, stood at 170 trillion drachmas. By that time, Davis’s pile of notes would scarcely have been enough to buy a loaf of bread. Commentators on the current ...”