“... order his dishevelled social and sexual lives for good. The year before they married, the diaries peter out. Stanley Weintraub, who has edited all 12 diaries and the fragments from 1880 and 1917 into two stout volumes, gives the game away in his lively account of their provenance. When Shaw married Charlotte, he left his papers at his mother’s house in ...”

“... book shows that Biafra and Ethiopia have not jaded our response to suffering, and as we read, our pain turns to anger and indignation: we despise those responsible and are ready to believe anything about them. There is, incidentally, no doubt about responsibility for the disaster. Stalin must be primarily answerable as the leading advocate of ...”

“... research Claire Tomalin draws – concludes that Dickens visited Nelly for elocution lessons. Peter Ackroyd has put an only slightly less pure interpretation on the connection: Dickens and Nelly enjoyed (or suffered) a ‘sexless’ marriage, in which she played out the part of the idealised virgin bride. An opposite line which traces itself back to ...”

“... riches and their kids, rotten before they are ripe, as Diderot said of the Russians improved by Peter. Buying and selling and even raising or making essentials is just that. It’s a necessary basis for civilisation, even a part, but it’s not civilisation itself. There’s no real way to glorify business just as it’s hard to glorify eating and ...”

“... them Hugh Stephenson, Business Editor of the Times, and Labour’s recent convert, Peter Hain), adding a prologue and epilogue of his own. This original enterprise is certainly illuminating in its revelation of the reasons why a handful of ordinary people with varied experience belong to, and in many cases are active in, the Labour Party. Their ...”

“... passages have been inserted, their historicity guaranteed by the editor John Steel. We read that England was beset, then as now, by vandalism, defacement, crime based on envy, vile domestic architecture, eyesores at beauty spots, over-tight trousers and captious book-reviewers. Southey (if it is he) puzzles over some of our manufactures: who needs ...”

“... figure, Wild proclaiming that the more nefarious trickeries of Homeric and Virgilian heroes (read in schoolboy cribs) confirmed him in his high opinion of the wisdom of the ancients, or Ubu taking on the features of Shakespearean kings. Satirists have more than once compared the practical jokes of schoolboys with the cruel whims of tyrant-emperors and ...”

“... it out with other notably Scottish words, wherever they could be found. His son records how he read a great deal of Scots in preparation for his translation, and when, for instance, he came upon the rare word doit (‘darnel’), plucked it up to use in place of the Authorised Version tares. Conversely, he avoided anything that might appear as an ...”

“... drawn from one of the very few among his collaborators who are still alive, the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza: Many admire Rutherford’s intuition which told him how to set up the experiment and what to look for ... Intuition is usually defined as an instinctive process of the mind, something inexplicable which subconsciously leads to the correct ...”

“... welfare policies, public health measures and, more specifically, scientific medicine – has been read by many commentators as a disaster. There is much negative hyperbole about the economic threat of non-productive old people, with their burdensome pensions and, more important, their revenue-consuming illnesses and disabilities. The view that added years ...”

“... of the enemy, as she did in the Fortnightly; she was happier with the implacability of Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1940 Virginia Woolf was asked to supply ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ for an American symposium on current affairs concerning women. She had to fall back on rambling and padded reflections which she hoped might help in years to come the ...”

“... twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...”

“... see them, and burying a Kant or a Schopenhauer somewhere in the middle, where no one will ever read them, and regularly lugging the odd copy of something home with him in a briefcase, where he has nightmares of being squashed flat in his bed or on the can by the dead weight of accumulated books plunging through his shelves, and dreams of buying up his ...”

“... election, lent her approval to the conspiracy theory of the ‘grand remplacement’ of real (read: Christian) Europeans by Muslims. Since then, Swedish conservatives have lifted the cordon sanitaire, forming a coalition that includes the Sweden Democrats. And in Italy, the far right has won on its own.Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, one of the ...”

“... not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener can’t help assessing the extent to which their style and methodology has been directly transposed. Cronenberg seems to ...”