“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... here backs up Bricmont’s polemic: ‘Prigogine with his brilliant style writes sentences that may sound appealing to philosophers and laymen, and unfortunately to some scientists as well, but puzzle well-informed scientists.’ The analogy with Boltzmann’s view of Ostwald is clear. When Bricmont launched himself onto the more public stage, allying ...”

“... him; she sends a message suggesting that they meet face-to-face, only for JD to reply that ‘it may be time for me to unplug for a while.’ Her final e-mail comes back to her unread (‘I can drop the idea of meeting you; really, consider it dropped’), with the sour warning that their exchange has been interrupted: ‘BAD ADDRESS FILE. MESSAGE ...”

“... institutional changes brought about by the Royal Court. Covertly homophobic and misogynistic it may have been, but it was the Court and not the West End which provided a site for the women writers who emerged in the Eighties and many of the young gay male writers who emerged a decade later. And from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the beginning of the ...”

“... she said in her final statement, ‘and that I reserve the right to cultivate any relations that may please me. The war is not sufficient reason to stop me from being a cosmopolitan.’ After her execution, her body went unclaimed by relatives and was dissected by medical students. Her head went to the Museum of Anatomy in Paris, where it joined a collection ...”

“... preoccupations, and sought increasingly to draw links between them. Though some readers may feel that I have been too generous in my use of the personal material – particularly that relating to his feelings about his sexuality and his marriage – my judgment was that it was essential to any interpretation of him as a whole person. Lacey slides ...”

“... green, think again: he’s usually ‘a dull slate grey’. ‘Godzilla was not, as some people may still believe, borrowed wholesale from Japanese folklore.’ Intermediate-level fans also feel the lash: there’s no evidence, for instance, that the Toho back lot once harboured a fat props man who lent the monster his nickname in 1954. And if you’ve ...”

“... a massacre in Africa. He returns to urban disarray, the tawdry backdrop to life in London. It was May, and already more summer than spring. The leaves on the roadside trees were dustless, vivid, part luminous. Until late into the evening cars crawled in the traffic, windows down, music thudding. Children out of school squabbled in the street, kicked balls ...”

“... most illustrious prostitute, that she has a habit of lifting her shirt whenever she thinks a man may be interested in her, that she won a large settlement after a car accident but blew it all on drink and drug binges, which have in turn made her prone to psychotic episodes. Her room-mates, both older Hispanic men, are named – somewhat improbably – Mingo ...”

“... Kashmoulah is governor of Mosul’s Nineveh province, appointed by Yawer’s government. (There may be more going on in Iraq than the American military, which says its troops are fighting ‘bad guys’, is aware.) In 1959, as later under Saddam, Mosul provided between a quarter and a third of Iraq’s officer corps and much of its secret service. The ...”

“... accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound science over waffly Romanticism. What was the dispute about, and why was it so acrimonious? And why has this episode ...”

“... the next generation to rethink the issue. If the experiment goes well, the new House of Lords may come to seem a British analogue to a great French institution: the Council of State. This is an elite assembly of distinguished graduates of the grandes écoles who have earned reputations for sobriety and thoughtfulness as they ascend to the highest ranks of ...”

“... a founder of the US airline business and served as Roosevelt’s air commissioner in the 1930s. He may not have known either that Vidal’s mother, judging from Vidal’s account, resembled one of Williams’s ‘monster women’ – Vidal’s phrase for those figures of self-destruction in Williams’s plays. Nina Gore, the daughter of a blind senator from ...”

“... while the Tories ruled at Sam’s, Ozinda’s and the Cocoa Tree. By the end of the century, there may have been as many as a thousand coffee houses in London. The ones you didn’t go to were as important to your public identity as the ones you did. Places that were open to allcomers in principle might be selective, even exclusive, by custom. And Cowan ...”

“... political references – to, say, the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, the student uprisings of May 1968, and the deaths of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof – entirely without contextual comment. Here and there we are told that a work is ‘extraordinary’ or ‘a breakthrough’ without being allowed to see it, as if Gardner or Janson, or Google, can ...”