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“... for ‘write computer programs’), mark up HTML to create web pages, and know not only what’s going on, but also what’s about to go on. Above them are the übergeeks, the illuminati of the digital revolution: the kind of people, to use one example from Po Bronson’s entertaining ...”

“... to meet. It is that all this pro bono effort is devoted to a very peculiar end: making Microsoft’s customers happier. For these volunteers operate within Microsoft ‘newsgroups’. They’re not paid by Microsoft; the vast majority are not even recognised by Microsoft. But they all work (and some work quite hard) to make Microsoft richer by solving its ...”

“... In lieu of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the familiar lament about the decline of French intellectuals is rather unfair ...”

“... company Indiana Bell received an anonymous telephone call. In a menacing tone a young man’s voice informed him that he had planted bombs in several switching systems known as 5ESSs. ‘They’re set to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country – it’s a sort of competition, a security ...”

“... politics was the key to our truths as well as our myths. In spite of our differences, both Tony’s Marxism and the French Left and my own recent How to Change the World are dedicated to the memory of the same independent thinker, the late George Lichtheim. We got on well in personal terms – but then Tony was easy to like, and generous. He thought very well ...”

“... On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black woman who had just completed her day’s work in a department store in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white passenger, as required by municipal law. The incident sparked a year-long bus boycott, the beginning of the modern phase of the civil rights revolution ...”

“... This biography opens with a vivid chapter on Raymond Williams’s funeral. Entitled ‘Prologue, in Memoriam’, it transports the reader to Clodock Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong ...”

“... Raymond Williams’s death in January 1988 has been followed by an avalanche of obituarial tribute. To some extent, the tributes were a matter of the Left giving a last, sad cheer for one of its most versatile and prolific heroes. Alan O’Connor’s bibliography of works by and about Williams covers an extraordinary 47 pages and includes 29 critical works, five novels, five short stories and five plays by Williams (which, together, have sold over a million copies in Britain alone), as well as perhaps a thousand articles ...”

“... Eric Ambler told an interviewer recently that though he often felt the urge to write for the stage he was put off by the scrutiny to which he would be subjected: and the pun in the title of his autobiography was a precaution against exposure. It proved less necessary than he had feared, but the message underlying the opening chapter is unmistakable: readers, and reviewers in particular, should keep their distance ...”

“... or, say, 1951’, by which date all who had served in the war had returned to the university. So constituent members of Our Age need to be over sixty and could be over ninety. Secondly, there is an obvious social or educational restriction, since a very large number of people who would qualify by reason of age fail to get in because they never went to a ...”

“... the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development. ‘That can’t be right,’ he thought. Some more digging told him that it was. The Journal of Race Development, established in 1910, was one of a spate of academic journals, associations and institutes ...”

“... Over the last few decades, however, both these advantages have been whittled away. They have been so not because the Right has suddenly started to have the best of the intellectual argument – the most persuasive conservative arguments are still those current since the days of Burke and Adam Smith – but because of what has happened in the world since the ...”

“... by Nikolaus Pevsner unsurprisingly confine themselves to buildings and their settings, but it’s tempting to be distracted by what you already know about a place, about Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, for instance, the latest county to have its volume revised and expanded by Yale.* The mid-18th-century country house designed by James Paine is described as ...”

“... Let me begin with a motor trip in 1944 by two scientists down the valley from Lord Mountbatten’s headquarters in Kandy to the jungle. The younger of the two remembers what his companion talked about. He was interested and expert in everything around him – the war, Buddhist religion and art, the geological specimens he would retrieve from every ditch, the properties of mud, luminous insects, the ancestry of cycads, but his recurrent theme was the fundamentals of biology and of the enormous developments just becoming possible through the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s ...”

“... in New York, 17 March 1923. The tall, lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s son, Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, artillery officer on the Western Front, faultless husband and devoted father of three, was on a lecture tour, trying to raise money for the forthcoming all-British attempt (his third) on Mount Everest. Mallory had ...”