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“... building a fairer industrial society will be doomed to failure.’ This is the challenge to which Martin Ryle seeks to respond. In a closely-argued book he works his way through the relationship between green politics and the politics of the Left, and looks at other European countries where the green percentage of total votes cast in elections is ...”

“... The Aristotle ... was already burning. Meanwhile, some sparks had flown towards the walls, and already the volumes of another bookcase were crumpling in the fury of the fire.’ So, in the final pages of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco destroys ‘the greatest library in Christendom’, hidden away in the impenetrable labyrinth of his macabre abbey ...”

“... had tapped into an invitation to say hello sent out by intelligent beings from another galaxy. Martin Ryle, the future astronomer royal, was in charge of the group. His response was unambiguous: if they had really found extra-terrestrials they should immediately dismantle the new telescope and not tell a soul about the signals, on the grounds that ...”

“... In the middle of his new book Michael Baxandall wonders whether the ‘complex Newtonian-Lockean sense of how we see’, which he has just expertly expounded, provides any ‘purchase’ on Chardin’s painting, A Lady Taking Tea, to which ‘our primary explanatory duty is due.’ It is bracing to discover that we have this duty but I am puzzled by what exactly needs explanation ...”

“... it’s also perceived as highly risky. After Drake’s broadcast in 1974, the astronomer Martin Ryle asked the International Astronomical Union to ban interstellar messaging, explaining in a letter to Drake that it was ‘very hazardous to reveal our existence and location to the Galaxy; for all we know, any creatures out there might be ...”

“... he interviewed live philosophers and dead ones (the latter mediated by other live ones). The late Martin Milligan was a talented philosopher, one who was blind, not from birth but early in life. Magee, with characteristic panache, had a splendid idea: let’s get at some philosophical issues about perception by pursuing a dialogue. The resulting exchange of ...”

“... alternatives, he was drawn to the kibbutzim being organised in Palestine, and to the Zionism of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, who advocated the foundation of a binational state in Palestine, rather than a Jewish one. He stayed at Penn thanks to the presence there of Zellig Harris, a linguist and left-wing Zionist who was interested in ...”

“... of gerunds in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell surpasses the mere fourteen offered by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (‘knowing, learning, discovering’ etc). The narrator of Glyph (1999) has yet to mark his first birthday but can already outsmart his poststructuralist father. Philosophers of language have been frequent subjects of his onomastic ...”

“... other, they scratched their heads and thought again of their unclubbable old professor. Gilbert Ryle – Collingwood’s successor in the Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy – wrote in 1970 of his rueful realisation ‘that my generation was at fault in not trying to cultivate our remote senior’. (Collingwood was 11 years older than him.) Even Ayer unbent ...”

“... or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but saving lives ...”