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“... has its fascination: yet there is also a more serious problem, which the new study by Reeves and Gould directly addresses. By what actual processes are ideas preserved, circulated and developed? ‘Can the ideas of one person or group lurk around in the atmosphere, having, as it were, a continuing life of their own, so that they can be plucked out of the air ...”

“... a dilapidated book. He steals it, reads it, and becomes obsessed. This book is the manuscript of Gould’s Book of Fish, which immediately announces itself as something special. Its binding emits a supernatural glow, and – rather like Borges’s ominous ‘Book of Sand’ – its contents don’t seem to end: ‘each time I opened the Book of Fish what ...”

“... Herbert Spencer’s death, Beatrice Webb, who had known him well, referred to him as Darwin’s John the Baptist. Spencer would have relished the description, which is in many ways appropriate: he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and was responsible for popularising the term ‘evolution’. Indeed, his adherence to evolution, ‘a profession ...”

“... which has failed the Lawrences – it is life itself. This is the private story. Wing Commander John Lawrence, after his 28 years in the RAF, took early retirement and became an assistant secretary to the MCC, another bastion of tradition. With his turned-up moustache and his near-worship of the Royal Family, he comes over as the archetypal Flying Officer ...”

“... either scholarly – new material come to light – or critical: new slant on a known personality. John Bierman does have some fresh material. ‘New documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier ...”

“... music), would not have approved, so Said here listens instead to another of his heroes, Glenn Gould. Gould was a serious admirer of Strauss, whom he praised for employing ‘the fullest riches of late romantic tonality’. But Said is interested also in an affinity the composer exploits between the present time and the ...”

“... Party a divergent, indeed an almost totally dissonant, perception of what socialism means. Bryan Gould, who used to be on the left of the Labour Party and sits for the ‘safe’ constituency of Dagenham (Labour vote 39 per cent, compared with 76 per cent in 1966), asks why his constituents, mostly council tenants, car workers or public sector ...”

“... presented a woman incapable of speech, François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994) presented a man who was abnormally articulate – one who in the 22nd film, for example, rehearses the revealing personal ad: ‘Friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously ...”

“... constituency disappearing with a prostitute for five minutes or so. She recognises Raymond Gould and turns to blackmail once the business is done. Gould refuses to deal and she takes her tale to Mike Molloy, a Mirror reporter. Molloy confronts Gould, who refers him to his ...”

“... whip up rural Georgia into an anti-semitic frenzy. In the midst of all this, the outgoing Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. The Governor’s own investigation had uncovered a conclusive flaw in Conley’s story: if the sweeper had used the elevator merely to transport the dead body to the basement, as he claimed, then ...”

“... Dawkins is not much impressed with this sort of caution. Interestingly, he shares with Stephen Jay Gould, the other leading public representative of Darwinism in the English-speaking world today, the conviction that evolution matters, not just intellectually and philosophically, but personally and even socially. It is partly because Dawkins and ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... in raping the children’s nursemaid) inveterately homosexual. It is perhaps inevitable that Tony Gould should present Colin MacInnes’s life as, in effect, a protracted Oedipal drama: one from which he was quite incapable of extricating himself. Like his mother, or in competition with her, he became a writer; the subjects he chose to write about were those ...”

“... recounted by Dava Sobel. Rather, her hero, the ‘lone genius’ of her ostentatious subtitle, is John Harrison, a dour Yorkshire carpenter and village choirmaster who spent half a century from the early 1720s trying to make clocks capable of determining longitude and to convince metropolitan grandees that he had done so. Kendall’s watch was a faithful copy ...”

“... the former, however, is a more complicated matter. Mr Burn blames Arthur Koestler and, even more, John Middleton Murry for putting about the suicide theory. Koestler had taken Hillary up after he had written The Last Enemy and Hillary greatly admired him (Mary was less enthusiastic about the author of Darkness at Noon: ‘Too much intellect, too little ...”