“... sea and back to us as more carbohydrate. The carbon loop used to be closed, and if we had stuck to hunter-gathering and muscle-powered farming, it might have stayed so for ever.Then we found fossil fuels. Marco Polo reported that the Chinese kept warm by burning black stones, but our present energy gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use ...”

“... newly born’. This is not, in my understanding, how most analysts think of themselves (although Michael Balint’s idea of analysis as fostering the birth of a ‘new beginning’ gets close). Winnicott is presenting us with a choice. We can go for the therapeutic quick fix, the full-frontal political assault on any traces of dependency, to be smoked out ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... houses south of the Tigris, the river that stretches towards Amara. Lieutenant Colonel Hunter Hobson, who had been with Spahr at flight school and later ended up in the same squadron, the famous ‘Death Rattlers’ 323, told me Spahr had what few people have: ‘an amazing ability in the airplane’. When I spoke to Hobson he was at the Miramar ...”