“... had had no working hypothesis of the atom before their totally unexpected result. I once held this up to Sir Karl Popper as an argument against the hypothetico-deductive method, which postulates that scientists advance by first formulating hypotheses and then designing experiments to test them, rather than by the inductive method which consists in ...”

“... the Russians will refuse him a visa. Two of the essays deal with Soviet relations with the West. David Holloway rightly attributes the troubles of détente to the two sides’ inability to agree on what it should mean and, in particular, to the Americans’ insistence that the Soviets ‘restrain their efforts to increase Soviet influence in the world’, a ...”

“... Rilke’s Orphic sonnets, indeed to the metamorphic world of Orpheus himself. It held fast to a field of indigenous obsessions, but its effect was not merely to celebrate indigenous ground: it opened that ‘nailed and boarded’ window of the first line in such a way that a sense of loss became a sense of scope, and what might have been a ...”

“... army, the government, the judiciary, the public schools and the class system, all of which were held up as worthy of incredulous laughter. And so, in discussing the movement that Beyond the Fringe helped to kick off, perhaps it would be better not to talk of satire (satire being only one of its ingredients) but ‘anti-establishment comedy’. Another thing ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, not the exhibition pictures of the Salon painters, that held sway. It wasn’t just a matter of size. If a picture is to be seen all the time, a degree of disengagement, an absence of overt emotion, will give it a better chance of holding its place. When Modernism of one kind or another suggested new ways of ...”

“... of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 pages; volumes by Christopher Hibbert and Saul David hover around 500.) Seen from certain perspectives, what had happened was a complete collapse of British security, authority and intelligence. The first real mutiny novel, Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859), captured this frank, demoralising view ...”

“... even married her Antony a good few times. The early stages of European portraiture began, the late David Piper suggested in his 1992 study, The English Face, with tomb-effigies in the 12th century. Neither beauty nor individuality were the point of these monuments in death to rank, wealth and piety. None of these portraits in stone looks like anyone I have ...”

“... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...”

“... it was he who set off the massive explosion at the castle where his uncle and the duchess once held their secret meetings. By the end, this ironic chronicle of 19th-century heroism has taken us from the age of Romanticism through the onset of high capitalism to a Fin de Siècle of decadence and pointless terror. Until now, Boleslaw Prus has failed to make ...”

“... Dillon, and rushed back to Kennedy, who gave Dillon the job. Graham also recommended his friend David Bruce for Secretary of State, advice the President-elect didn’t take, choosing Dean Rusk instead. At Graham’s suggestion, Bruce became Ambassador in London, and before very long Graham was badgering Kennedy to sack Rusk and give the job to Bruce. Philip ...”

“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”

“... in other words. He has been sentenced to death for an unspecified offence, and is currently held in a cell below the tide line. His cell fills up with seawater twice a day, leaving only a foot of air in which to breathe. His jailer, Pobjoy, brings him scraps of tattered parchment, on which he paints clichéd ‘scenes of bucolick bliss’. Pobjoy sells ...”

“... large’. It wasn’t just that Greenberg was quick to separate art into good and bad that Berger held against him, but also that he disdained anyone who disagreed with him. Greenberg himself took the view that he belonged to a relatively small group who could distinguish between good, mediocre and bad art, and dismissed people – like Rosenberg and Lawrence ...”

“... guaranteeing liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state. Such provisions are held partially to explain the peculiarly non-ideological tenor of American politics. From the outset, moreover, wannabe ‘Americans’ had come to the New World to escape the trammels of established churches and the hierarchical rigidities of feudalism which ...”