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“... Stalin purges (Darkness at Noon), had made him something of a hero for me, and when in 1961 Hilary Rose and I were invited to a party at his Alpbach residence we jumped at the chance, sublimely innocent of the CIA connections. Despite his by then passionate anti-communism, Koestler was fascinated by the Lysenkoist prospect of the inheritance of acquired ...”

“... Arriving at university from the shelter of a London suburban home, I was soon introduced to curry. Unaware that Indian cuisine is built around a wide range of spices, my ambition was simple: I would prove my sophistication by eating without flinching the hottest Madras or Vindaloo. Something of the same determinedly trivial desire to prove himself is revealed in Edward Wilson’s Naturalist ...”

“... The issue​ of evolutionary inevitability was brought sharply into focus by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale. The shale was formed 511 million years ago, in the period when animal life was first emerging ...”

“... I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.’ Thus James Watson opens his notorious account of the discovery of the structure of DNA which won him, Crick and Maurice Wilkins a Nobel Prize in 1962. Whichever other of Watson’s judgments have been controversial – notably his dismissal of Rosalind Franklin, from whom, courtesy of Wilkins, he and Crick were provided with the crucial X-ray photographs of DNA crystals – his assessment of Crick has scarcely been disputed ...”

“... Modern biology​ , at its conception in the 17th century, inherited one unshakeable belief, two mysteries and an unfortunate error of timing. The belief was in the immutability of species, that each species has essential, unalterable characteristics, which can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. The mysteries were, first, over what it is about life that distinguishes it from death, and second, the process by which a fully developed organism, be it chicken or human, emerges from a fertilised egg ...”

“... enough of them were feminists to make possible a strong counterattack. There were skirmishes over Steven Goldberg’s The Inevitability of Patriarchy (1973) in which he argued that men’s power in the world was a product of their testosterone-driven urge to succeed, regardless of the definition of success in any given society. But although he had based his ...”

“... impossible to connect findings on the brain with its actual function. In The Making of Memory Steven Rose recounts his search for the physical changes that occur when anything is committed to memory – a quest that has dominated neuroscience for twenty years. The techniques used to pursue it are remarkably ingenious. In the PET scan, a radioactive ...”

“... way is what you might call a no-brainer. As Ian Hacking said in the last issue of the LRB, quoting Steven Rose quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Since we use our brains to make up stories, and to make sense of the stories of others, it’s hard to disagree with the idea that the capacity ...”

“... Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly powerful ways of imaging activity in the brain. But he is first of all a biologist. His guiding principle is that we cannot understand the human brain unless we understand how it came into being ...”

“... Erwin Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ‘anti-Sokal’ hoax, one of the contributors to The One Culture?, Steven Shapin, leads the reader initially to assume that the quotations come from critics of science in the arts ...”

“... and Sargent take time out to secure the principles of statistics and probability for their work. Steven Rose, criticising Eysenck’s egregious application of techniques of statistical correlation in his work on IQ and race, has said that ‘Eysenck seeks to correlate IQ scores with EEG patterns almost in the manner of a 19th-century ...”

“... from methodological and interpretative problems (see Not in Our Genes, by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin) which may have inflated estimates of the genetic contribution to IQ. Ridley’s conclusion that IQ has a heritability of around 50 per cent rests, however, on more recent studies by Thomas Bouchard and his colleagues at the ...”

“... pieces included stuff like the following, about a modest southern French rosé: ‘Tavel has a rose-cerise “robe”, like a number of well-known racing silks, but its taste is not thin or acidulous, as that of most of its mimics is. The taste is warm but dry, like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalising suspicion of bitterness when ...”

“... by American operatives in orange boilersuits at an underground facility; he falls in love with Rose, the new Doctor’s main assistant, and comes to understand his predicament, squawking ‘I-am-a-lone!’ with a sorry droop of his suckered arm. It was touching and horrible and tremendously funny – a story like a piece of sculpture, to be admired from ...”

“... I met​ Steven Runciman several times towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince Consort, but he did it and our little turn round the room made me feel in some psychic way closer to the court of Queen Victoria ...”