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“... Doctor, the Lord, the Spy’ and Profumo himself. The leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, dubbed them ‘this dingy quadrilateral’, though, as will soon appear, a much dingier quadrilateral was composed of four very different people. The origins of the Profumo family were Sardinian. Jack Profumo’s great-grandfather, who had, the author ...”

“... Vindaloo. Something of the same determinedly trivial desire to prove himself is revealed in Edward Wilson’s Naturalist. The great myrmecologist’s memoir is filled with references to scaling the highest mountains, collecting the most species, and above all to standing where no (white) man had ever stood before, finding organisms hitherto ‘unknown to ...”

“... the leaking of her name to the press? If he did, was it retaliation aimed at her husband, Joseph Wilson, who wrote in the New York Times that the allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger was false – based, it turned out, on forged documents passed on to Washington and London by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI? How did it ...”

“... to edit the Quarterly. But for the magazine’s first twenty-five years, its mainstay was John Wilson. As Christopher North, he wrote mountains of copy. Reviews, feature articles, verses, sentimental tales of peasant life, unsentimental tales of gothic horror: he churned the stuff out in heroic bouts of scribbling that tested his physical strength as much ...”

“... what’s an adaptation and what’s a by-product, or ‘spandrel’ (to use Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould’s architectural analogy). In their introduction to The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern, $29.95), a collection of essays which will be published later in the autumn, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan ...”

“... would now (at 71) ‘do nothing for ever and ever’. In his well-known essay on Housman, Edmund Wilson made a special point of the author’s giving up work on a poet as interesting as Propertius in order to spend his life with Manilius. Wilson regarded the switch from love poems to obsolete science as evidence of an ...”

“... and a poet. She tells the story of how she came to write the book, with the help of the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, in her Introduction. Gould, for his part, does some contentious stage-setting in his Foreword, where, with the apparent aim of encouraging respect for the ‘important’, ‘influential’ and even ‘beautiful’ theory of preformation, he ...”

“... us, for instance, Lou Reed stumbling around in New York, the New York Dolls in Paris and Brian Wilson in ‘psychicpain’, as well as Iggy Pop and the Rolling Stones. Chapters on later stars like Morrissey, Guns ’N’ Roses and Happy Mondays lack this vivid authenticity. Looking back, you can see why Kent made such an impact. When he started writing in ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... The appeal to necessity has a long history in warfare. In The Rights and Duties of Neutrals Stephen Neff calls it ‘a sort of juridical “wild card” which allows a state to “trump” the normal rights of other states in times of desperation’.* Germany wasn’t the only country to have played it: in 1807 necessity was invoked to justify ...”

“... in getting Labour into power after 13 years of Tory Government. (She didn’t think much of Wilson’s lot, especially that ‘ugly’ George Wigg, the one ‘with the ear of Harold Wilson’ who, in addition to being apparently genetically modified, she ‘always thought looked like a pervert’). She has a place in ...”

“... When Stephen Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell ...”

“... problem has been worked out, there’s not often much point in going back over it – as Edmund Wilson almost said, who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd afterwards – but good examples of the form have other attractions. They usually seem to owe their durability to elements in them that are gratuitous, strictly speaking. The sleuths don’t really need all ...”

“... has given up trying to struggle in the pulpit with the discoveries of science. At first, the Rev. Wilson writes a lengthy pamphlet against the ‘poisonous assault on the good name of the Scriptures’. But is has little effect and Wilson decides that to prove his point he must leave behind the numbing regularity of his ...”

“... biography with autobiography is often sidestepped by biographers less equal to their task than Stephen Gill, either by equating the ‘truth’ about a writer’s life with what that writer has specifically chosen not to reveal, or by accepting what he has revealed too literally. The first alternative is adopted by A.N. ...”