“... by freelance contributors. So Max mentioned my name to the appropriate editor, Ralph Hegley, and said that I could write obituaries of philosophers and intellectuals. Hegley asked to have lunch with me. We met at a restaurant in Covent Garden – expensive Italian, snowy tablecloths, steamroom hush, Pompeian ruins of cheese on a silent trolley. We sat at a ...”

“... people were adapting and tailoring the formulae before them. The shift towards iconoclasm under Edward is charted, and we are shown the increasing readiness of Protestants to answer yes to Archbishop Arundel’s old question: ‘were it a fair thing to come into a church and see therein none image?’ The conspicuous exception to this trend, as many readers ...”

“... become logical and correct.’ When a man can say both so much and so little on this subject (he said it in 1939 when he was 33) it is difficult to predict how he will react to misfortune or indeed what he will consider to be misfortune. The letters hold several surprises. When in 1948 his wife decided to become a Catholic all hell broke loose. As no ...”

“... In 1930, Steinbeck met the most influential figure in the formation of his writer’s philosophy, Edward Ricketts. A maverick marine zoologist, Ricketts was adopted by Steinbeck as his guru; he passed down to his disciple the biological materialism that was to run through all the subsequent writing (its most memorable expression is Rose of Sharon’s suckling ...”

“... Janda, a peasant, when asked where he obtained the libels he was spreading about the priesthood, said: in the book of a Saxon soldier. He [the parish priest] answered me: That isn’t possible, one cannot understand those books immediately! And me, I proposed to him to give me whatever book he wanted. I would read it to him one time only, and then I would ...”

“... the sample) reported experiencing 1550 incidents within the previous 12 months, 85 of which they said had been reported to the Police as racial attacks. Given that these 116 individuals represent a larger population of perhaps 12,500 potential black victims throughout the borough, one would have expected something in the region of 9200 separate incidents to ...”

“... New styles of architecture, new styles of advertising, also signalled the change of heart. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, became the presiding genius of Madison Avenue; he made cigarette advertising sexy, and persuaded women to smoke Lucky Strikes. The age of euphemism gave way to the age of dysphemism; sex, suppressed by the matriarchs, came out ...”

“... Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic irritation to mar one’s enjoyment of this wonderful compendium of ...”

“... Pimpernel. He was often compared with other practitioners of ‘history from below’, such as Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé, even though their Marxism was anathema to him. His magnum opus, on the armées révolutionnaires, the semi-vigilante armed bands who enforced the Terror in the provinces in 1793-4, might, in ...”

“... defined in that of basic physics. ‘Science is physics plus abbreviations,’ so such Positivists said. But hardly anyone believes this any more. Reviving the unity of science programme is most of what consilience amounts to. Though Wilson is aware that it’s now pretty much a dead issue among philosophers of science, he thinks ‘its failure, or put more ...”

“... tree of the virus and the rate at which it mutates. Bette Korber, the head of the research team, said she thought Hooper’s thesis was unlikely, but would not rule it out. Hooper does not pretend the OPV/Aids hypothesis is watertight; it is offered soberly, if insistently, as the theory which best fits the salient epidemiological facts: above all, the ...”

“... of the others. The excitement came about with the discovery by the American theoretical physicist, Edward Witten, of previously undetected further sets of symmetries (or ‘dualities’), which link various parts of the theory, in particular its reasonably well-understood low-energy aspects to the rather ill-understood high-energy ones, where it’s not even ...”

“... World War.’ Sir Oswald, for example, always tried very strenuously to distance himself from said horrors after 1945 and, though he was unconvincing in his rewriting, at least made the attempt. His widow has never bothered even to feign that effort, and is sometimes too languid and spiteful to conceal her prejudices even now. The subject clearly fatigues ...”

“... in saying, ‘We are no longer what we were,’ does not feel obliged to add ‘Alas’. That much said, and while many of Seidel’s poems are hi-tech performances, I find that the poems that stay most powerfully in my mind are broodings upon the dreadful, where there is no question of being charmed or conned but only of being appalled. Some of these poems ...”

“... Getting to know the great body of music from Bach to Sibelius was ‘far more educative’, he said, than being dragged through dead languages. From Mozart, ‘the master of masters’, he believed he had learnt how to say profound things in a lively way. Ernest Newman, with whom Shaw crossed swords over Wagner and Richard Strauss (their long fencing ...”