“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... one of the millennial hysterics lined up by Elaine Showalter in Hystories – fictional son of Richard Rhodes perhaps, a scientist who has written about the making of the atom bomb, and also described how he was abused in a book called A Hole in the World. However, in Acts of Mutiny recovered memory is used in a literary – not to say, Gothic ...”

“... Somewhere behind this notion lies the legendary cable Hearst is supposed to have sent to reporter Richard Harding Davis and cartoonist Frederic Remington: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ The line is echoed in Citizen Kane. The Cubans were already fighting for independence from the Spanish, and the US, the argument goes, liked the ...”

“... so we do not know to what precisely Hazlitt refers – perhaps a passage in the lecture on Richard II, in which Coleridge claims that ‘the Spirit of patriotic reminiscence is the all-permeating Spirit of this Drama’ and that the play is likely to ‘fall dead on the hearts of Jacobinised Englishmen’. Back in the 1790s, Coleridge and Thelwall had ...”

“... initially brings to the foreground, in as offputting a first chapter as you are ever likely to read. He describes himself as a sex addict in the grip of an irresistible need to seduce, with a special preference for teenage girls. To Princeton and other campuses he came, burning with an indiscriminate, bisexual and, in the age of Aids, potentially fatal ...”

“... and says that he could write the same words with a very different meaning: The stanza can be read as all about science, all about standing in the moving spotlight, about taming space and time, about the very large built from the quantum graininess of the very small, a lone flower as a miniature of evolution … The mystic is content to bask in the wonder ...”

“... it was a publisher’s commercial decision; yet it is not really credible that anybody wanting to read this book would be so inveterate a ‘general reader’ as to be scared off by a few foot or endnotes. The facts necessarily include a lot of information about the operations of the East India Company and, less directly, about the economic assumptions of ...”

“... to the already smouldering Humvee. A week after I had been to look at Saddam’s stuffed horse, Richard Wild, a young British freelance journalist, went to the Natural History Museum to get a story about its destruction by looters. He was a tall man with close-cropped blond hair and he was wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers. To an Iraqi he may have ...”

“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”

“... in February. Reading from the transcript of an interview with Irving on Australian television, Richard Rampton QC, barrister for the defence, asks why Irving had said that the idea of black men playing cricket for England made him feel ‘queasy’. Irving: My reply to him on air was, what a pity it is that we have to have blacks on the team and that they ...”

“... future prime minister Spencer Perceval ‘opened for the prosecution’; in fact, though Perceval read the indictment to the court, the prosecution was much too important to be left to so relatively junior a barrister, and was opened by the attorney general himself. In 1794 Paine published The Age of Reason, ‘probably’, thinks Hitchens, in reaction to a ...”

“... from scientists: Erwin Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ‘anti-Sokal’ hoax, one of the contributors to The One Culture?, Steven Shapin, leads the reader initially to assume that the quotations come from critics of science in the arts and humanities wing of ...”

“... sense of identity’, called Freud and the Non-European (2003). ‘Identity,’ we read there, ‘cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed.’ The context is Freud’s reminding us that Moses was an Egyptian.Edward was ...”

“... Book, with its sardonic farewell to the reader: ‘Now sir, what is your censure now? You have read me, I am sure. Am I black enough, think you, dressed up in a lasting suit of ink?’ The binding’s colour is well fitted to the dark humour of this cynical puritan, and its disdain for heraldic ornament nicely mirrors Taylor’s invitation to the reader to ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”