“... thing. Since that day, dead bodies and fashion have seemed to me specially linked, though that may be just a personal thought. Someone else might tell you that, suddenly back at their mother’s house for a funeral, they had snuck out to the pub, or gone running, or played some favourite music, loud. They might find an ex to have sudden sex with, as Nick ...”

“... solid but an impulse, an atmosphere. Everybody knows what Roentgen did in science, even though we may know or need to know nothing else about him: he discovered X-rays in 1895. Few know who Higgs was or is, but he gave his name to the mysterious Higgs Boson, about which physicists argue. Nothing in science permanently carries Bernal’s name. Most of those ...”

“... capable of both homosexual and heterosexual relationships ... We do not know – however much we may legislate on the subject – whether the normal sexual relationship is hetero- or homo- or bi-.’ In the same year Virginia Woolf, interested in her active engagement with the times, wrote to commission an autobiography from Holtby for the Hogarth ...”

“... tour of Finland) in a way that is supposed to have been licensed by Diderot himself. Yet Diderot may be a tricky fictional model. He himself recognised that what could give the Novel its generic power was psychological exactitude, especially in the hands of Samuel Richardson. Before Pamela and Clarissa, the term roman referred, he wrote, to ‘a tissue of ...”

“... to intercept Hammarskjöld’s DC-6 was provided only by Beukels – some of the general points may have been touched on by de Troye in earlier meetings with Kemoularia. But the notes give the impression that Mr X and Lamoumine had their own sources inside the UN and knew when Hammarskjöld left Leopoldville for Ndola. Beukels was instructed by the high ...”

“... to the webbing between my child’s fingers. At least I hope it does. Rensberger worries that we may find the world of cells ‘miraculous’ – though he allows wonder. Most wondrous of all is the cells’ tendency towards self-assembly. Skin cells will form a sheet in the dish, breast cells will manufacture and secrete milk protein, and ‘muscle cells ...”

“... to a million instantaneous deaths,’ he wrote in the New York Review of Books. ‘The President may protest that his SDI dream implies a protection of people and not of silos. But however many times he does so, the fact is that were the “unthinkable” ever to occur, a future American President would probably never know how his enemy had behaved. He could ...”

“... is from Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ – Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt (‘where your gentle wing may come to rest’). I think of the word in connection with my birthday. On the evening of 6 September, from as early as I can remember until I was ten or so, my father and I would lie on a couch and listen to a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth. For the first ...”

“... brother’s apartment, twenty soldiers slept in his living-room. One of them was a paramedic who may have had doubts about the Army’s operation. He had earlier told my brother that he thought well of the Palestinians, but felt they were badly led. My brother had told him what he thought of the Israeli leadership. Before the officer left he told Samer: you ...”

“... French Communist Party. Kahnweiler said Picasso was the most apolitical man he ever met, and he may have been right. In 1934, Picasso accepted an invitation from the Falangist avant-garde in San Sebastián to meet José Antonio Primo de Rivera, future leader of the Falange, and the son of the military dictator during the last years of the monarchy. Picasso ...”

“... to dismiss their notions as primitive, irrational or bizarre, you should reflect that the fault may lie not in them but in you. The chances are that the problems that bothered them were nothing like the ones that strike you as obvious or inevitable, and that they were offering sensible answers to their own questions rather than foolish answers to ...”

“... of will to find everything out. On the other hand, it’s also increasingly clear to me that there may be little to find out and that no one, Onc Doc, Onc Nurse, really knows very much, except in an academic way. Everything is presented to me statistically, as probabilities. I can’t find the right question to break through that, to talk about the cancer that ...”

“... has helped the Progress Party to become a major political force. Its share of the vote may have dropped from 22.9 per cent to 16.3 in the 2013 parliamentary elections, but it was able to enter the governing coalition for the first time. When it was established in 1973, the PP was known as the ALP: Anders Lange’s Party for a Strong Reduction in ...”

“... would be asked who or what is the institute. The answer seems to be Dr Saxl and such persons as he may select to help him. We cannot but think that this answer would be found very unsatisfactory. I am not particularly referring to the fact that Dr Saxl is not of British origin, though that does not make matters any easier.’ The next idea was to attach the ...”

“... be understood That ‘somehow’ God plaits up the threads, Makes ‘all for the best’, That we may lie quiet in our beds And not be ‘depressed’. Larkin’s work has been rebuked on psychological grounds even by fellow poets who, instinctively, dislike his unrelenting atheism and pessimism. Resistance to his poetry, in poets who do not share his ...”