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“... communicated influences? Bohm and Hiley point to recent experiments inspired by the late John Bell. Particles generated in pairs can move apart while maintaining a mysterious connectedness. Observing the state of one, an experimenter can be sure that its distant partner is in a correlated state, in much the same way as examining one half of a fish ...”

“... we observe is ‘fine tuned for life’, a claim that was investigated in the book which he and John Barrow co-authored, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. It enters, too, into his expectation that our universe will be found to satisfy the many ‘Omega Point Theory predictions’ which he generates. These predictions concern conditions which he thinks ...”

“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr’s thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness ...”

“... Freeman Dyson warns us in Imagined Worlds that he is now ‘an old scientist pretending to be a sage’ and that ‘we learn from science and from history that the future is unpredictable.’ As well as diagnosing our present ills, however, Dyson offers strong hopes that our descendants will colonise not just their own galaxy in its entirety, but others too ...”

“... information processing demands less and less energy as temperatures fall. Again, he says, John Barrow and Frank Tipler have argued for infinite information processing (and therefore infinite ‘subjective time’ for our appropriately odified descendants) in the final moments of a Big Crunch. Mental acrobatics could take ever tinier fractions of a ...”

“... Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much ...”

“... John Leslie comes to tell us that the end of the world is closer than we think. His book is no ordinary millennial manifesto, however. Leslie is a sophisticated philosopher of science, and the source of his message is not divine revelation, apocalyptic fantasy or anxiety about the year-2000 computer problem, but ‘the Doomsday Argument’ – an a priori argument that seeks support in probability theory ...”

“... for his next venture, in Ireland. Despite his background, his move there in 1896 was coincidental. John Leslie appealed in the SDF’s paper, Justice, for a socialist organisation to hire Connolly, who was facing destitution, and a job offer came from the Dublin Socialist Club at the modest salary of £1 per week. His time in Ireland would help shape his ...”

“... like the Loshes who took ideas seriously and were inclined towards radicalism. Sarah’s father John, born in 1757, was the eldest of four remarkable brothers. Their wealth came partly from land and later from the alkali works the family developed at the Walker colliery. The extended network of cousins and relatives by marriage (a number of whom were the ...”

“... the images for an article on the neo-romantic insularity of such artists as Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Leslie Hurry and Keith Vaughan, committed at that time to fervid inkiness and illustrational hypertension. The article went down well. (Cyril Connolly was nice about it in the Sunday Times lift.) Bacon will have ...”

“... they could not have failed to be true. Undeserved suffering does not merely happen to be bad.When John Leslie defends the Axiarchic View, he appeals to this kind of non-logical necessity. Not only does value rule reality, Leslie suggests, it could not have failed to rule. But this suggestion is hard to believe. While ...”

“... rumour could get about that Radicalism was really nothing more than a misplaced desire to tease. John Wilkes met all these criteria, and was therefore much loved. Peter Thomas has produced the first serious study of Wilkes for some years. This neglect is surprising, in that Wilkes was the quintessential English Radical. With few teeth, a pronounced lisp and ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon (the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell) is put forward as his country’s great 20th-century novelist: the Scottish D.H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on A Scots Quair (‘quire’ – or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’, Mearns being an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation of 1975 ...”

“... with dirty animals because American commerce Jews want profit?’ That same year in Berlin, Esther Leslie reports, Walter Benjamin was also thinking about Mickey mania. After talking to some friends, including Kurt Weill, Benjamin made a few notes in praise of this insolent, lowlife, magically animated creature. Mickey’s cartoons exhibited a commendable ...”

“... is anything to go by, but it gave her no confidence. Finally she took up with a young Dutchman, John Lenglet, who came from a background as respectable as her own, though he was already married, to an actress, and was still not divorced when he and Jean celebrated their bigamous wedding in The Hague in 1919. Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight doesn’t like ...”