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“... is the ability not to cure but to predict disease. The possibilities of prenatal detection of gross chromosomal abnormalities, such as Down’s syndrome, are now familiar, and the number of more subtle but deadly genetic diseases that can at least in principle be detected grows rapidly. It is also quite likely that predispositions towards such widely ...”

“... affront to good taste was his unembarrassed embrace of neoliberal capitalism. In an era of gross inequality he made his money by outsourcing production, globalising his consumer base, and manipulating selected markets. All of which makes Hirst’s reinvention of himself as a kind-hearted philanthropist surprising. Is he trying to flatter ...”

“... series and the book which made him a household name. It is not that it contains a number of gross oversimplifications, of which the most astonishing is the observation that Leonardo thought of women ‘solely as reproductive mechanisms’. Nor is it that there is also an occasional failure of the historical imagination: the women on the Romanesque font ...”

“... instrumental and rational political practice. The Leninist conception of the party may mark a gross caricature of Marx’s political vision and by now a sharp distortion even of Lenin’s own views: but it has certainly furnished an extremely helpful ideological and practical formula in the struggle for state power and an even more attractive ideological ...”

“... caring about the welfare state. Indeed Thatcherism is partly his legacy, day-dream turned into a gross sort of reality, for Thatcherism officialises the world of school inside the state. This accounts for Thatcherism’s never fully admitted popularity. A headmaster like Kinnock, who will give the boys anything they ask for, is not likely to found a ...”

“... John le Carré has patiently established himself over the last twenty-five years as the discriminating reader’s favourite thriller writer. The BBC’s adaptations of the George Smiley trilogy in 1979 and 1982 made him almost overnight a popular author on the Ian Fleming scale, and it can have done no harm that the TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy coincided with the Blunt scandal ...”

“... his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis ...”

“... follow. Even Day-Lewis was not wholly exempt from it when he received the laurels. His predecessor John Masefield had his merits, but writing good verse for occasions was not one of them. Indeed there is an interesting resemblance between the ghastly good taste of the modern tombstone – in chaste Cotswold or slate with a brief restrained inscription – and ...”

“... of the Bolshevik Autocracy (1952). As a publisher’s reader, he tried to prevent acceptance of John Erickson’s Soviet High Command. In the days of Times Literary Supplement anonymity Carr saw to it that he himself, Isaac Deutscher and, where needed, the wife of the Moscow journalist, Victor Louis, were employed as reviewers. He and Deutscher would ...”

“... in. Trudeau, ever the master of the contemptuous parting gesture, had forced his successor, John Turner, to approve over a hundred and fifty patronage appointments among the bagmen, hangers-on and courtiers of his reign. Cabinet Ministers accused of influence-peddling were pensioned-off as ambassadors to small unwilling nations and loyal apparatchiki ...”

“... its effects have survived the deepening disillusionment with the Iraqi and Afghan interventions. John Lewis Gaddis is a true product of this nationalist ideology and the imperial establishment it supports. Take this statement, from his short history of the Cold War: Americans, he writes, are ‘impatient with hierarchy, at ease with flexibility, and ...”

“... by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’ Once, governments had ...”

“... digitally rejigged versions were released in the late 1990s: in the merchandising of Star Wars, John Seabrook writes in NoBrow (2000), ‘dreams were being spun into desire, and desire into product.’ And then one day I got tired of it all and gave my toys away to a younger boy who lived down the road. A Galaxy Not So Far Away opens with a brilliant and ...”

“... stipulated that they should be ‘virile, throbbing with reality, but not likely to repel with too gross an expression or too brutal a realism’. London obliged after his fashion, though the editors go a little far in their enthusiasm when they claim for one rather indifferent and pretentious tale, ‘The Night-Born’, that it is inspired structurally by ...”

“... MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs ...”