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“... At the end of his life, the distinguished biologist C.H. Waddington took part in a discussion about the nature of mind. The circumstances were unusual. Waddington lay flat on his back, and his words were read from a prepared text by a friend. The discussion between him and the other two participants was lively: until, that is, there came a point when Waddington, having momentarily silenced his colleagues, abruptly left the room ...”

“... Both this and the following statement are false. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s book is well worth £9.95. One does not have to be a philosopher to realise that I have already gone further than a humble book-reviewer should. The value of the book under review is, you might think, a matter of opinion. Not so. It has now been established as a logically necessary truth ...”

“... Suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire, and with an extraordinary momentum his vital forces were strained to the utmost all at once. His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold … His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, all his doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of serene and harmonious joy and hope, full of understanding and the knowledge of the final cause ...”

“... When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge I used sometimes to have tea with the philosopher C.D. Broad, and we would talk about ghosts. Professor Broad lived in Newton’s rooms in Trinity, and his favourite spot for talking and for tea was an armchair placed beside the window where in 1665 Newton caught a beam of sunlight in the prism he had bought at Stourbridge fair and spread it like a rainbow on the floor ...”

“... solved the mind-body problem, since we would understand how consciousness arises from matter. Nicholas Humphrey’s book is a bold and speculative attempt to reconstruct mental history and hence to develop a theory of consciousness. He has a good project, and he is bracingly undaunted by its difficulty. He has a number of interesting and sensible ...”

“... of what happened to my father, for this book, too, brings together consciousness and a bomb. Nicholas Humphrey is an experimental psychologist, who is interested in art, culture, politics and the mind; and he tells us that he would have liked to have written a ‘real book’ which brought together all his ideas on these topics. Instead, he has ...”

“... the solipsist becomes the creature of another’s solipsism. For once, the subsumer is subsumed. Humphrey Carpenter’s assiduously documented biography leaves no doubt about the centripetal force of Benjamin Britten’s personality. Nor about the centrifugal violence with which people unwise enough to let themselves be sucked into that centre were so often ...”

“... I started writing the play I made much use of the biographies of both Auden and Britten written by Humphrey Carpenter and both models of their kind. Indeed I was consulting his books so much that eventually Carpenter found his way into the play. His widow, Mari Prichard, was more than helpful over this, though feeling – and I’m sure rightly – that I ...”

“... to determine the tone of the presentation, the rhythm and contrasts of each evening’s schedule? Humphrey Carpenter’s detailed account suggests that the mandarins of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should ...”

“... wonderful letters to his friend James Stern, together with a biographical essay about Stern by Nicholas Jenkins; a memoir by Stella Musulin, a friend of Auden’s during his years at Kirchstetten in Austria; Edward Mendelson’s bibliography of published letters by Auden; and a symposium on Auden’s great poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’. The overall ...”

“... the running of the thumb across the mouth, the enthralled, dreaming relationship to a poster of Humphrey Bogart: all this effort, this determined Wildean creation of the self as a work of art, and for what? So that you can look and behave not like a tough guy or even a thug but like a loser, the man who read the wrong manual. This is part of the film’s ...”

“... the time of this historic broadcast the announcers were Sergeant MacDonald and Guardsman William Humphrey Griffiths of the British Army, both recruited from German prisoner-of-war camps. While broadcasting for Büro S, they lived in an apartment in Berlin, wore civilian clothes, were provided with supplies of tobacco and alcohol and, if they liked, were ...”

“... privateers. The appetite of investors doubtless faded. It was, as Raleigh’s half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert put it, difficult to ‘carry over colonies into remote countries upon private men’s purses’. Someone, it seemed, needed to make a record of the good things that had been found and to give substance to travellers’ tales. Among the experts ...”

“... frank. But ‘frankness’ often conceals something. Here is her staccato characterisation of Humphrey Jennings: ‘He was a young Surrealist painter of 30. He was also a photographer, a poet and a producer of films. He was dynamic and was always bursting with a new idea; but as he had too many, he never got much accomplished. He was a sort of genius, and ...”

“... cultural barriers with Philip Marlowe, private investigator, immortalised on the screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, mortalised by Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the ...”