“... 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 ...”

“... like the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn that flowered on Christmas Day. The Puritan preacher Hugh Peter wanted to pull down Stonehenge, and the 18th-century Baptist Thomas Robinson boasted that he had ‘killed’ 40 stones at Avebury with his own hands. But, like the radicals who proposed that all churches and cathedrals should be razed to the ground, they ...”

“... kindly paterfamilias with twinkling eyes – disintegrated; his friends were appalled. Slater and Peter Ackroyd, looking at the same letters and bills of fare, the same reminiscences of children and admirers, aren’t convinced Dickens ever slept with Nelly Ternan, but Tomalin’s Dickens is so virile (those ten children): of course he did. We know little ...”

“... by someone ostensibly outside its world. Selznick was uneasy about the story’s aptness to be read as a white parable of the essential goodness of the slave-owning South. The film tries its best to alleviate the tacit racism, banning the word ‘nigger’ and repressing direct mention of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the real world would draw out the story’s ...”

“... in the spectacular understatement of the secret government report on nuclear war of 1955 quoted by Peter Hennessy (‘whether this country could withstand an all-out attack and still be in a state to carry on hostilities must be very doubtful’). To expect to die in the next war, as my contemporaries not unreasonably did in 1939 – Overy quotes my own ...”

“... of Jeremy Bentham’s all-seeing ‘panopticon’. That seems apt: it allows the government to read and hear almost every message that passes between us. In his new history of GCHQ Richard Aldrich claims that this surveillance capability constitutes potentially ‘the most insidious threat to personal liberty’ we face today. Bentham’s panopticon was a ...”

“... the Christians’ condescending term for those who weren’t believers (for ‘Gentile’, read ‘pagan’). The imperial backing for Christianity was symbolised by the ‘chi-rho’ symbol – the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek combined as a monogram – apparently invented by Constantine in the course of his successful military ...”

“... life – emblematically, almost mythologically – sets out challenges faced by many writers. Peter Alexander’s biography, Les Murray: A Life in Progress (2000), is a volume every poet and aspiring poet should buy, filch or borrow. Having first met Murray in 1985, I filched it almost as soon as it was published (and draw on it here). The most arresting ...”

“... and his world. Indeed, to get inside the mind of Mithridates one can still do worse than read a fictional reconstruction of his greatest enemy’s memoirs: Peter Green’s Sword of Pleasure inhabits Cornelius Sulla’s patrician Roman mind in all its brilliant, terrible logic. In so doing, and freed from the ...”