“... 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 ...”

“... grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by ...”

“... a complex but initially local English identity. Before too many readers protest, let it be said that the foregoing paragraph is an experiment in taking an ‘Irish’ view, looking at English literature to see if it will conform to an Irish (or Scottish or American) model. The new books by Seamus Deane and Liam de Paor are judicious and informative in ...”

“... conductors, dramatists, poets, philosophers, historians, politicians with something to say, said it on air, without undue constraint though never extempore – even supposedly spontaneous conversations were carefully scripted. Music was balanced with talk in a six-or-so-hour sequence each weekday night. You could sit and listen to one programme after ...”

“... the introduction of a prices and incomes policy, 43 per cent are in favour of it. (Come back Edward Heath!) On several issues a substantial minority stand out against the orthodox view. In a Party that has done so well out of the first-past-the-post system it is heartening to discover that 23 per cent are in favour of Proportional Representation. Another ...”

“... showed them to be poor passionless creatures compared with him and Frieda. If in spite of what he said he sometimes suspected that regularly knocking each other black and blue was not an infallible sign of married happiness, he would have held the insight against Katherine. In his very mixed feelings about her, resentment played a large part. In the terminal ...”

“... of the 19th century could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars, who has chosen to do nothing for a living and regrets it, reels off four possibilities:I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for ...”

“... points out, to insist that Cyrus, too, had been an Achaemenid, though Cyrus himself had never said anything of that sort. Darius became an even more dominant Great King and so, despite the possibly mythical status of Achaemenes, the rulers of the Persian empire became known as the Achaemenid dynasty. That the prize Darius won was worth fighting for hardly ...”

“... the butcher or the cattle.’ Why are there no counterparts to Twilight’s ethical vampire, Edward Cullen? Why are there no vegetarian zombies? (Well, undoubtedly there are some somewhere, but if so, they’ve never caught on.) Many zombies don’t merely want food, they want flesh – in the earlier films, human flesh, and lately any kind of ...”

“... Shakespearean scholar called Roland Verre, whose name implies that in him scholarly verity meets Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the real author of Shakespeare if you believe the idiots out there. Verre is brought in by Random House to counter Arthur’s sceptical annotations on what he has come to believe is his father’s forged play. The scholar’s notes ...”

“... 81 types of torture in all, from the barbecued St Lawrence to the skinned St Bartholomew, who is said in different versions to have been crucified upside down, flayed alive and beheaded. Jacobus opts for all three. Often it is only after a long series of torments have failed to dispatch a saint that the executioners cut off his head. The litany of holy ...”