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“... flashback – and, no doubt, the experience – can be, the puzzle is how poorly accounts of it read, and how little difference the terrific powers of LSD-25 made to the social history of the time. Leary turned himself into an evangelist of evolutionary transcendence, and seems doomed to replicate the serious-mindedness of evangelicism while churning out a ...”

“... tiresome 94-page preface to attacking writers such as Habermas, Ricoeur and George Klein, who read Freud as having begun a rigorous but not scientific approach to the mind. ‘Scientific’ has to bear a fairly complicated burden here. The emphasis in some of these writers is on the absence of anything like a relation of objective causality in their ...”

“... our ideas of the sexual. We do not just go to bed, Heath explains, with meretricious manuals: we read novels too. And there is a connection between the genres, not just a superficial connection, in novels where we are told how to do it in stories of other people doing it, but a connection in the idea of ‘the novelistic’ itself. The novelistic is the ...”

“... years of Field Marshal Lord Wavell, The Chief, is no exception. It would, indeed, be possible to read the book without ever being properly aware that the subject’s decisions involved the killing, maiming or imprisonment of thousands of men. But Mr Lewin’s book also suffers from a more pernicious shortcoming of the genre: the assumption that all ...”

“... got stuck in the allegedly golden years of good King Clem. Michael Foot – though, together with Richard Crossman, he was wrongly excluded from the Attlee Government – is one such. In consequence, Foot the politician is not fully integrated with Foot the man. Whereas the rest of Foot is clever, subtle, charming, broad-minded and living in the present, Foot ...”

“... an essay in vindication and vengeance interspersed with titbits of political gossip, and I did not read it at the time; it was only at the start of the research for Yes, Minister that I discovered how much sharp observation and serious analysis it contained. It was left to Douglas Hurd, her successor at No 10 when Heath moved in, to pay tribute to its ...”

“... to this mode of thinking, and the grounds for their perplexity have recently been explored by Richard Davis, Jennifer Jay and other experts in the United States. They have found that, far from having sunk into amoral pleasure-seeking, surprisingly large numbers of Chinese of all ages continued to resist the Mongols, often in quite pathological ...”

“... 1959. ‘It will make far more interesting reading than The Quest for Corvo.’ In the late 1970s, Richard Cobb took the view that Peters merited ‘further study, perhaps even a short biography, as he is fairly outstanding both as an academic fraud and as a bigamist’. To complain that the account we have at last been given is somewhat unrelenting, that the ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... guarantors of national prosperity. A ragged girl in a Midlands nail factory was interviewed by Richard Henry Horne. She did not, he reported, ‘know what a country dance is, was never at a dance in her life; never saw a dance; never heard of Harlequin and Columbine; has no idea what they are like.’ Horne, peculiarly, is recalling pantomime conventions ...”

“... until they quarrelled (which Strindberg did sooner or later with most of his friends), the poet Richard Dehmel, the magazine editor Julius Meier-Graefe and Knut Hamsun, but not Sibelius – he couldn’t stand the noise. Wherever he lived, Strindberg needed such ‘clubs’, as well as a garden where he could grow things. He was also beginning to have ...”

“... precisely which feeling. Wendy Steiner, in The Scandal of Pleasure (1995), is another such critic; Richard Meyer, in Outlaw Representation (2002), is another. In fact, some critics back then, supportive of Mapplethorpe but unaware of what he’d said, found nothing at all pornographic – or so they have claimed publicly – about the work. Roland Barthes, for ...”

“... Instead, Saddam will appear in court again this autumn, but only to have more specific charges read against him, and perhaps for the prosecution’s case to begin. Karl Rove will want American voters to be reminded of Bush’s singular achievement, since few in the United States would query that the capture of Saddam was a good thing. However, the delay ...”

“... Both Dracula and Frankenstein owed their immediate afterlife to unfortunate theatre adaptations. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) turned Mary Shelley’s book into a moralistic tale of hubris, as well as making the creature mute and introducing Victor Frankenstein’s pantomimic assistant (here called Fritz). The ...”

“... up like a great novel, before driving off a narrative cliff. Yet by the end I still felt I had read something significant. So what is Meredith up to when he isn’t telling a story?Let’s go back to the beginning. It is the middle of the night, and the inhabitants of Riversley Grange are woken by a banging on the door. On the step is a man barred from the ...”