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“... Science does not customarily pose big questions. It poses small questions.’ It may seem odd to find such a statement in a book whose main questions have to do with Mind and the Cosmos, the twin mysteries of human existence, and whose answers are based upon current scientific understanding. The statement, however, embodies an important truth, upon which the entire book rests ...”

“... On 29 June 1989, a security manager for the US telephone company Indiana Bell received an anonymous telephone call. In a menacing tone a young man’s voice informed him that he had planted bombs in several switching systems known as 5ESSs. ‘They’re set to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country – it’s a sort of competition, a security test ...”

“... they might think that Thompson’s tentative answers are the quaint curiosities of a bygone age. Ian Stewart thinks that such dismissals are wrong, the product of an obsession with biochemical detail that can become myopic. Life’s Other Secret is intended to display the many possibilities for the mathematical analysis of nature, and pays homage to ...”

“... are combative on this point, and so united that they frequently refer to themselves as ‘Jack&Ian’. To this winsome dyad the notion of astrobiology is limiting in that it stands for astronomy as seen from Earth plus Earth-style biology, so that its thinking is governed by anthropic concerns such as the search for ‘habitable zones’ elsewhere in our ...”

“... important. ‘No group is any better than its drummer,’ the Rolling Stones’ late piano player Ian Stewart tells A.E. Hotchner. ‘Drummers are the heart of a group,’ confirms Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: ‘a good one is worth his weight in gold.’ And here is the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock on drummer Paul Cook: ‘that steady ...”

“... it’s popular even among some scientists. In The Collapse of Chaos, Jack Cohen (a biologist) and Ian Stewart (a mathematician) argue that the laws of nature are not ‘true’ in any real sense: ‘Our prized laws of nature are not ultimate truths, just rather well-constructed Sherlock Holmes stories.’ This view might have made good sense back in the ...”

“... Canterbury), and Certainly not mediocre. But neither were Dennis Compton, Freddy Trueman or Ian Botham, or indeed Graham Gooch, and they were (are) all very much Players. In his autobiography, breezily ghost-written by Martin Johnson, the joker of the Independent’s back page, Gower plays up his Cavalier image for all its worth. And he makes no bones ...”

“... Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the seventh Marquess of Londonderry, who died in 1949, will not be moved up the scale of historical significance even by so accomplished a book as this. Its author is unlikely to be disappointed. Ian Kershaw’s purpose has not been to write a full biography, or to rehabilitate a politician he considers to have been unjustly neglected ...”

“... injudicious love-affair with a boy called George Nathaniel Curzon, later to be Viceroy of India. Ian Anstruther in his new biography aims to set the record straight in this regard – although not, it may be said at once, at the expense of a full account of O.B.’s career as a teacher of near-genius and a far-sighted educational reformer. To some extent he ...”

“... and so on. On this reading, Major could be presented as a drearier-than-either cross between James Stewart and J. Alfred Prufrock. He was prime minister by accident, or for-a-day. He’d won the premiership in a raffle, or had it laid on for him by Jim’ll Fix It. There was of course a brutal snobbishness in this approach, as there had been in all the sneers ...”

“... little comment or censure. In 1824, for example, a rich Edinburgh spinster called Christina Stewart bought land in Morvern, a peninsula south-west of Fort William, from the Duke of Argyll’s estates and soon afterwards evicted 135 people from their smallholdings to make way for two large sheep farms. Nothing suggests Miss ...”

“... and housekeeper, seem to have broken his heart and he died, greatly mourned, in July 1790. Dugald Stewart, the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh and Smith’s first biographer, made an exceptionally acute observation about Smith’s thought: that all his works are presented in the form of a machine in which a connecting principle – gravity in ...”

“... been influenced by that player’s unseemly links with showbiz, in the shape of Danny Baker, Rod Stewart and Chris Evans. Like David Beckham, Gazza seemed to believe that there were prizes more glamorous than those which were in Hoddle’s gift. He, too, was unfocused; he, too, needed to be realigned. Gazza’s expulsion was, for me, a bitter ...”

“... continues to promote the flat-earth doctrines of its founder, the Free Presbyterian minister Ian Paisley, as well as to provide ample opportunity for satire. The DUP’s Nelson McCausland, Northern Ireland’s culture minister, who believes that Ulster Protestants are descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel, has campaigned against the geological ...”

“... for thirty years or more. Thus it was that the hard-headed Scottish-American business tycoon Ian MacGregor was appointed to sort out British Steel, and sort it out he did: after a doomed 13-week strike, the men accepted new manning procedures which in plants such as Port Talbot raised productivity overnight by far more than had been achieved in a decade ...”