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“... No, I said, the title wasn’t sexist, I was thinking about the Russian cosmonauts who were stuck in orbit, and how they hooked up a British princess and an interpreter and got them to make polite conversation. Then there was Daniel, who wanted a child but whose girlfriend didn’t. After five years of precautions he began sleeping with another woman ...”

“... The Expert An old girlfriend appears on TV answering questions about the homeless. Yes, the new government initiative is welcome as far as it goes. No, it doesn’t even attempt to tackle the root of the problem. Phones are ringing behind her, colleagues are bent over keyboards ... I want to ask how much she earns, whether she still leaves the cap off the toothpaste and if she has children, what are their names? Just before we go off the air she gives me that patient look – as if a grasp of the basic issues will for ever elude me, as if I think I can make a difference by giving money to beggars in the street or offering them a bed for the night ...”

“... The Wren All that day, beginning hot, they'd set out to find Cocteau's grave, he couldn't help seeing the tiny bruise on her throat where her necklace, she said, had got caught. The weather broke, the grave turned out to be Braque's, her shoes were a size too small ... Home and dry, she peeled off her socks and showed him the rubbed-red patch, about the size of a farthing, where a blister had formed, and expired ...”

“... in every language, Therefore unreal, out beyond a gap No one can cross, figures inside a mirror. Charles Boyle – a stouter Carcanet poet – would sooner lose his touring bike, his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his ...”

“... of the sanguinary career of Tamerlane for the Time-Life History of the World. After my editor, Charles Boyle, had read the first draft, he went home and dreamed a strange dream in which ‘Old Hoppity’ turned up at Time-Life’s London offices. The dream, in time, metamorphosed into a poem, which he included in his collection The Very Man (1993). It ...”

“... or bad, clever or stupid? Stendhal asks himself in the summer of 1832 is the opening of a poem by Charles Boyle. Wet from the shower    towelling your breasts you ask me if I’ve read    Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic goes Michael Hulse’s poem ‘Fornicating and Reading the Papers’. Meanwhile, Didsbury has ‘The sky is like an entry ...”

“... Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a gentleman’s agreement: that so-called objective criteria had more to do with etiquette than Truth; that Truth or what counted as truth was akin to what ...”

“... why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist upbringing). To take a topical example: what ...”

“... watch, monitoring their performance over weeks and months in the royal closet at Whitehall. Charles II had time for repeated discussions with this physically ill-favoured, socially maladroit and reputedly malodorous mechanic because he understood very well what such an invention was worth, and, accordingly, what mechanics who could deliver such goods ...”

“... government offensive in Syria’s Idlib province had glowing reviews from commentators such as Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, who wrote that the weapons had ‘transformed the strategic dynamic 180 degrees’ in Idlib in just five days. The enthusiasm is easy to fathom. Drones create their own marketing commercials in the ...”

“... English poets. Sexually ambivalent, a notorious member of the gang of young roués at the court of Charles II, he nevertheless managed to write a few poignant and haunting poems which suggest that his public notoriety concealed a sensibility reacting to the intellectual crisis of the later 17th century. All my past life is mine no more;   The Flying hours ...”

“... often rather heavy-handedly – in nearly all the early chapters. But Ray is no helpless Charles Bovary. He is by temperament suspicious and by training a professional spy, and he starts to use all the resources of his position to shadow Morel – against the explicit orders of his superior, who wants him to concentrate on Kerekang’s grass-roots ...”

“... natural capacity for exuberant togetherness. What about Hallam’s eventual wife, Audrey Boyle? Well-known to them as she was, must she not have found it a strain to be swallowed whole by the Tennyson establishment, an extra daughter in the house, who happened to be married to the eldest son and heir? Not a bit: it seems to have come as quite a ...”

“... Flora (1665) Evelyn also pillaged, is not distinguished from John Ray, the great botanist. Robert Boyle appears as ‘Mr Royle’ and is solemnly indexed as such. The editor has no great pretensions to be either a classical scholar or an expert on English 17th-century history; and he deserves gratitude for his labours on a difficult text. It is a shame that ...”

“... of his art. In the post-Restoration years astrology suffered for its Civil War success. Charles II continued to seek guidance in the stars, but faith among the political and intellectual élite waned. The scientists did not pause to refute it, presumably because its dependence on a geocentric system appeared to render it irrelevant in an age of ...”