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“... popular faith in drones, and are hardly challenged in the books that have been written about them. Michael Boyle describes Gorgon Stare, an array of video cameras designed for the Predator B drone, a large-wingspan aircraft that operates at an altitude of 25,000 feet, as offering ‘persistent, wide-area surveillance of small towns’, enabling ...”

“... from paradise. The words I have just quoted are the last words of the first volume of Nicholas Boyle’s biography of Goethe. The date is June 1790, and other things have been happening in Europe, to which Boyle immediately turns in his new book. Germany at this time was far from a nation state – it was a confusion of ...”

“... Train-robber Biggs and murderer Boyle present in their testaments a challenge to our moral reflexes. Both authors have appalling records: South Londoner Biggs with countless petty interviews, conspiracy to commit biography, and now brazen autobiography executed in ruthlessly-priced hard-back, plus indecent exposure on a Sex Pistols waxing: Glaswegian Boyle with an audaciously publicised apologia here compounded in paperback, cold-blooded participation before the fact in a television film witnessed by millions of law-abiding citizens, and flagrant indulgence in the plastic arts (to wit, sculpture with a sharp instrument) under the very noses of the prison authorities ...”

“... choreographed. Even the trains look as if they want to get in on the act. The movie is Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, now playing nearly everywhere and sporting ten Academy Award nominations. It’s a brittle and clever movie, often uncertain about its intentions, and sometimes, it seems, embarrassed about them, but the end is sheer pleasure and ...”

“... Blake’s father was Albert Behar, whose Sephardic Jewish family cut him off with less than the proverbial shilling because of his marriage to a Dutch Christian woman called Catherine Beijdedvellen. Behar Senior then became a British citizen, having served in the French Foreign Legion and the British Army. On his death in 1936 – a bad period not only in England but throughout Europe – he left a widow and the young George in somewhat reduced circumstances ...”

“... I imagine, formed our several ideas of what an argument is. But Locke – Locke plods. Aside from Michael Ayers, how many contributors to this issue of the Review, reviewers or reviewees, have read Locke’s Essay, word for word, from beginning to end? Fewer, perhaps, than would like to admit it. But Locke rules. No matter how briefly he is skimmed or how ...”

“... precisely in their having expunged ‘Romantic’ ideas from their psychology. Part of Mary Boyle’s study of schizophrenia consists in examining quite why the category is used in the way it is: as a taxonomic catch-all that cannot hold, in any useful scientific sense, the varieties of behaviour it is asked to hold at the moment. If the Romantic legacy ...”

“... as villains. The star of London Weekend Television’s new Once a thief? is 22-year-old Michael Baillie, who began his criminal career as a burglar at the age of eight, and served his first borstal sentence at the age of 15. According to the Sunday Times, he originally wanted to play football for Aston Villa, but now he’s thinking of taking acting ...”

“... Agency’s station chief to crush Kerekang. (Ray’s boss, the paranoid and bloodthirsty Chester Boyle, who sees a Marxist conspiracy every time someone mentions reform, is a crude assemblage of loathsome traits.) Ray, stark naked and half-crazed, with his dead brother’s manuscript wrapped round his stomach to look like a bomb, single-handedly turns the ...”

“... collective slaughter. The war figures prominently in the collection of Fifty Stories by Kay Boyle, most directly in the stories of wartime Occupied France, but also in the ominous atmosphere of pre-war Austria and in the desolate, poisonous recriminations and distrusts of post-war France and Occupied Germany. Yet in many ways the best of these stories ...”

“... intelligence, from a conceptual currency debased by moral idiocy. According to Nicholas Boyle in his Foreword to The Dear Purchase, when this monograph appeared one of Stern’s older colleagues told him: ‘If you want to get on, do not write this sort of thing again.’ Stern, Boyle adds, ‘was incensed. He ...”

“... Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach, one of cinema’s most fashionable young directors (Danny Boyle) and its most adored male star (Leonardo Di Caprio) are about to make a film version of it, a remarkable achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one. Few novels are so influenced by film as this one, in its subject-matter, its ...”

“... and admire, and upon occasion celebrate, but do not call in question or discuss.’ Thus Robert Boyle, progenitor of English science, in A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686. Boyle found eight meanings for the word, and pretty much suggested we scrap the lot. No one paid him any heed. Nature is ...”

“... been left there over the years. ‘Louis L’Amour, Danielle Steel … Guy Davenport, T. Something Boyle. There was also a copy of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale.’ What inspiration could a nervy jockey – or a confident novelist – hope to get from The Winter’s Tale? The closest thing to a horse in the play is that notorious bear. Acevedo sticks to Dick ...”

“... are in essence violent. This thought strikes the vitalising spark in most zombie films. In Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s film 28 Days Later (2002), Christopher Eccleston’s quietly deranged army officer argues that there’s nothing new about the epidemic of rage that has brought Britain down: it’s ‘just people killing people’. How are we to ...”