“... would have included a grand social vision of planned cities drawing distant inspiration from nice places (Italian hill towns, 18th-century spas) which had escaped the vivid, dismal chaos brought about by modern transport and industry. That chaos is now more often acknowledged than challenged by architects. The self-generated complexity of cities strains ...”

“... embodied the restless, forward movements of his era, ‘the spirit of the age’. In his new book Richard Jay has explained how and why this happened. There have been several biographies and studies of Chamberlain, but this is the best analysis of the public man, finely wrought and exact, and undoubtedly demanding of the reader. Old politics can be very stale ...”

“... schemer), George V, Trotsky, Stresemann, Hitler, Speer, Churchill, Heidegger, Benjamin, Dowding, Richard Hillary and the Duke of Windsor, who was very thick with Hitler and had an expensive wedding present from him. There are quite a number of others whom I have to admit I know nothing about except what is here more or less obliquely conveyed. Some of the ...”

“... place both in France and in Britain, but certainly not in the same manner. Social historians like Richard Cobb have done such amazing work on the French Revolution, studying the minutest lineaments of ‘the real thing’, that one begins to look for their sort of history in a historical novel and to feel thwarted when such topics are ruled out of court by ...”

“... new educational class which dominates the journals and the universities. Defence policy provides a nice dividing line between those who believe that our survival depends on a new generation of Polaris rockets and those who are slightly embarrassed when asked where they propose to get the money from which they want to spend on doing good. But social policy? It ...”

“... with the reassurance that ‘I have taken some pains to know his wife, who seems to me thoroughly nice.’ What induced Russell to get so deeply involved in the situation? He confessed early on that it gave him a chance to restore his sense of his own worth and of his capacity to succeed, while helping two young people for whom he professed an ever increasing ...”

“... bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life ...”

“... reconstructed iguanodon, the head of both the table and the beast was held – as of right – by Richard Owen, universally acknowledged as Britain’s premier anatomist, ‘the English Cuvier’, and arguably the foremost British ‘man of science’ of his generation. It is true that he was not, even then, entirely without detractors. Gideon Mantell, his ...”

“... that they call ‘hill climbing’ in the computer-learning trade (hence, I suppose, the title of Richard Dawkins’s new book). It’s guaranteed to get you where you’re going so long as the distance between is finite. (And so long as there are no insurmountable obstacles or ‘local maxima’ in the way: nothing is perfect.) Hill climbing is often the ...”

“... night was gut-wrenching, like extra-time in a soccer match that will not end. Although there were nice victories along the way, as when Hillary Clinton won her Senate seat in New York with great ease, or when the liberal Democrat Jon Corzine won his Senate seat in New Jersey albeit only after having spent massive amounts of (his own) cash, they seem more like ...”

“... many others, including a couple by those equivocal and highly talented authors, T.H. White and Richard Hughes, published before the war and now forgotten. White’s ‘The Troll’, which appeared in 1935 in a collection called Gone to Ground, concerns the narrator’s father, who went on a fishing trip to the north of Sweden and was nearly eaten by a ...”

“... knows? – the gems of William Oldisworth will be on every civilised person’s lips. It would be nice to think of the Chadwyck-Healey databases as so much new gadgetry and nothing more. In fact, they will in time subvert the whole notion of what it is to be a scholar, a teacher or a student. Richard Altick called his 1960 ...”

“... and heard in it, to my discomfort, the most enormous howl of grief. The social industry, as Richard Seymour calls it, doesn’t just produce new doubles with every keystroke, it also enables casual sadism. ‘Come for the nectar of approval,’ Klein quotes Seymour. ‘Stay for the frisson of virtual death.’Klein saves up for the end of her book the ...”

“... Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up capital. They were such nice young men, the professor recalled. He wanted to help them. ‘Well, maybe I forget now,’ the professor told Hoffman. ‘But it seems to me I gave them 170,000 roubles’ – that is, 170,000 roubles from the institute’s notional coffers. This was an ...”

“... the camp after a trip to Butlin’s Pleasure Fair and a fish and chip supper, he noticed a ‘nice girl’ watching him from one of the caravans. After a few days of shy manoeuvring he got the chance to walk with her among the sand dunes. He then returned to Northampton, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl, Joan Burton. He wrote to her and she ...”