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“... When I saw the title of Carl Sagan’s new book, I was troubled. I was afraid he might have followed the path of other scientists who turn to study the brain because they are disillusioned by the inhumanity of physical science. I need not have worried. He remains an enthusiastic astronomer. The title refers to the sprightly opening piece in which he describes a visit to the backstage storerooms of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris ...”

“... in all this, the loss is effectively made good by a before-the-credit-titles introduction by Carl Sagan, American television’s equivalent of James Burke and Patrick Moore, combining Burke’s Flash Harry glibness with Moore’s manic enthusiasm. In rhapsodic prose, Sagan sets the Grand Canyon in the perspective ...”

“... CoEvolution Quarterly which revived the idea of space colonies. Though it had the support of Carl Sagan, James Lovelock and Buckminster Fuller it came to nothing, but there’s time ...”

“... ice was to attract attention with a huge (preferably exploding) drawing. The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss wanted to plant a visual proof of Pythagoras’ theorem, comprising a right-angled triangle bordered on each side by squares, in the Siberian tundra. The borders of the shapes were to be marked out by trees and their interiors filled with ...”

“... active scientists – have crystallised: the belletristic essay, such as the work of Lewis Thomas, Carl Sagan, Alan Lightman or Harold Morowitz, which reveals the elegance and spirit of science; the scientific discourse that is interesting to the broad public because of its ‘human’ dimension, as in the immense, neo-Darwinian undertaking of Stephen Jay ...”

“... in New York and they blew the fuses in half of my apartment building. He showed me a telegram from Carl Sagan saying he would be willing to do it for a tiny percentage of the film’s gross. Kubrick decided to let the film speak for itself. Throughout the filming of 2001 our chess games continued. Once, in the studio, when we couldn’t find a ...”

“... fed into the anti-nuclear sentiment of the 1980s, not least in the notion of nuclear winter, which Carl Sagan introduced to the world on Halloween 1983. Later modelling showed that a nuclear winter wouldn’t be as severe as Sagan and his colleagues first thought, more like a nuclear autumn, and the fear of it began to ...”

“... of that. He has scorn for even the greatest popularisers in the Bronowski tradition, men such as Carl Sagan. He tells a story of some of the sciences from the time of Galileo to the present. Coming soon: the ‘humbling of science’ as we enter another ‘post-’ age (post-scientific, this time). He much regrets the pushing aside of the very idea of ...”

“... my wink. I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we want, but what if we are incapable of seeing the signals ...”

“... Atwood, Paul Theroux, Fay Weldon, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Dwight Bolinger, Elizabeth Traugott and many more). What is revealing is how the panel’s response to certain types of usage has changed between 1969, the date of the first survey, and 1988. Take, for example, one of Amis’s favourite bête ...”