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“... recalls it in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, subtitled ‘A Fable of the Sixties’). It occurs to John Dyson, Frayn’s downtrodden hero, that ‘failure was the secular equivalent of sin.’ But even his failure now seems like success. He and Bob Bell work out of the same office collating ‘Years Gone By’ or ‘The Country Day by Day’, duelling ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the Greenpeace affair. The main facts are well enough known – of the books under review Dyson is by far the surer, better-written guide – and they suggest that little has really changed. The DGSE and its predecessors have never, after all, had principled objections to committing acts of violence in other people’s countries. Once again, the ...”

“... in the freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with ...”

“... he argues, and hence (a step sure to raise many eyebrows) unlikely to be good physics. Freeman Dyson, he notes, has shown how life and thought might continue for ever in an endlessly expanding universe despite the constantly increasing cold, or rather because of it. Dyson explains that as temperatures fell more and ...”

“... that keen. ‘Oh God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time Inkling Hugo Dyson cried. John Wain, an attendee at meetings in the late 1940s, described his heart sinking as Tolkien appeared at Lewis’s door with a bulging jacket pocket, yet again. Tolkien looked down on Lewis’s Narnia, which he ...”

“... would change for ever. The unlikely setting for the transformation – as detailed in George Dyson’s engaging history – was the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The institute had been founded in 1930 with funding from the department-store magnate Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Advised by the education reformer ...”

“... the camaraderie of the laboratory, for there is no experimental work. Which is why the career of John von Neumann, who did do new work, and is the nearest thing the book has to a hero, is not typical. When he wanted to build a computer at the Institute he met resistance: Harold Cherniss, a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, became an Institute ...”

“... water, Feynman had visibly put his finger on the reason for the catastrophe. As his friend Freeman Dyson later remarked, ‘the public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.’ In a dissenting report, which witheringly contrasted the ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... instead to provide scraps of gossip that might give insights into his character and conversation. John Aubrey related that Shakespeare was the son of a butcher who ‘when he killed a calf would do it in high style, and make a speech’. By the early 18th century, Shakespearean biography was turning into something of an industry, with an indiscriminate ...”

“... At least, it serves the same functions, if you swap laptop for typewriter, mobile for landline, Dyson for Hoover.One big thing, however, is different. In 1983, that kitchen contained just a handful of transistors, all of which lived in the – there’s a clue in the name – transistor radio. In 2023, every item on that list of domestic objects uses ...”

“... their visual idiom was gibberish to other theoretical physicists – but, with the help of Freeman Dyson at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the diagrams soon became the lingua franca of QED physicists and their use was extended to several other sorts of physics. The diagrams have acquired iconographic status: Feynman decorated his camper van with ...”

“... religion’, in which America is a ‘shining city’ where the sacred fire of freedom is kept. John Keegan recently announced, in the course of a television debate in which I also took part, that to allow ‘cultural history’ onto the protected turf of war studies is to issue a chaotic licence to mavericks who will write about ‘anything at all’. Yet ...”

“... in lawn tennis helped him to become integrated into the student body. Compared to Frankfurt, the Dyson Perrins Laboratory at Oxford, where he worked, was rather primitive and ill-equipped with instruments, and it was a handicap that no microanalysis was laid on as a service until an unintended benefaction of Adolph Hitler’s brought the arrival of two ...”