“... with the express purpose of creating the conditions for the sustenance of life. While it may seem that where some see God, Lovelock sees Gaia (‘Gaia looks after us’), he doesn’t say Gaia is God. He has never claimed that Gaia is sentient, or benevolent, or anything so obviously woo-woo as that. Rather, he maintains that all the evidence ...”

“... has nothing to do with air or water, and that accent is only part of the story. In different ways, Richard Burton and Aneurin Bevan (Beaverbrook’s ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’) were also champion putters-on. So, in a rather minor key, were at least half the members of my mother’s extended family. In a putting-it-on competition between Roy Jenkins and my ...”

“... Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as somebody recently bloodied in battle, waiting for the next push. Nor should Crosland be seen as ...”

“... Put on the kettle and make the tay, and if they weren’t happy, that you may. By the time he wrote this, O’Malley knew all about post-revolutionary disillusionment. He went on to produce a sequel, The Singing Flame, which is less accomplished but possesses much of the same drive and power. Always a stringent self-critic, he ...”

“... her own. Or named, as Clarissa is named for Mrs Dalloway, making her party for the Aids-stricken Richard a reprise. In fact, in Specimen Days, Whitman is not read at all. He is spoken, his words endlessly cited by the central character of each of the three tales. They cannot help it. Whitman takes over their voice. ‘He hadn’t meant to speak as the ...”

“... high command when it conveyed Lenin back to Russia in that sealed train. In the Watergate affair, Richard Nixon scored not one but two own goals: first, by organising a burglary which could produce only minimal gain for the Republicans if it worked but would destroy him if it went wrong; then by secretly recording his conversations in the White House in the ...”

“... the will. I had the same reaction as I read Piers Morgan’s diaries. Whatever sense of humour I may have had drained away as the ever ebullient, jokey, matey, vindictive Morgan described a self-contained world of vacant celebrity and tawdry sensationalism that I have never quite believed anyone took seriously. But it becomes clear that Morgan took it very ...”

“... Richard Evans’s history of the Third Reich – it will be completed by a third volume covering the war – is an invaluable work of synthesis. The mass of specialist studies we now have makes a general history all the more useful, and not only, as Evans suggests, for those who know little about the subject. Evans, a social historian, aims to cover ‘not only politics, diplomacy and military affairs but also society, the economy, racial policy, police and justice, literature, culture and the arts ...”

“... of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour. The high-living image may hold true for some American ambassadors, many of whom are big donors and political appointees, but it’s not a realistic picture for most diplomats. In fact, diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task ...”

“... and image, and especially the vexed relay between written and photographic evidence. Loch Ness may seem a whimsical subject for an artist whose source material has recently included psychiatric reports on Nazi war criminals and interviews from the 1960s with Minimalist artists, but it’s worth considering the machinery of print and picture by which the ...”

“... of kittens. More than half the space is divided off by a fence of stretched wires – perhaps Richard Serra’s standing slabs and rolled up sheet of metal are not so well poised as to be proof against a cannoning child. This means that one of the two Barnett Newman paintings can only be seen obliquely, that neither can be advanced on and retreated ...”

“... about its deliberate obscurity. It is the equivalent of shutting a door in its reader’s face. As Richard Sewall, her biographer, noted, ‘She enjoyed riddles, apparently enjoyed being one.’ But was she a riddle that wanted to be solved? Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives ...”

“... is said that some animals have a better claim to be cared for than a severely retarded child? It may be argued that it is not of practical importance that these ‘practical’ philosophers say these things, so long as other people keep a modicum of good sense. But it is rash to count on that through all political and social upheavals, and the many ...”

“... a society which, on a racial basis, promotes certain groups over others. People who feel this way may have the intuition that barring race as a factor in assessment is a simple, effective way of avoiding an illicit racial hierarchy. A third tendency – the one that issues in affirmative action – is to believe that race must be taken into account to assist ...”

“... open now and then, as, for example, by Clause 41 of the Great Charter of 1215: ‘All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs.’ There were toll ...”