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“... to nukes. The assumptions governing the thinking of the SETI pioneers are clearly explained by Paul Davies in his new book, The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe?* Davies works in cosmology and astrobiology and heads a unit at Arizona State University called the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in ...”

“... seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives.’ Dunstan Ramsay, the hero of Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, says this; but one can assume that Davies is also talking about the reception of his own novels. To reduce character and incident to their ‘mythical elements’ can be criticised as an evasion of ...”

“... philosophy in Swansea since 1967, and Michael Cohen, a former Tory voter described by Sir Michael Davies as a ‘careful and reasonable sort of person’. In early 1990, all four lecturers, Hunt, Maclean, Williamson and Cohen, formally complained to the Academic Secretary of the University, Mr Jeffrey Pritchard, about standards at the Health Care Centre. Mr ...”

“... at the age of 30, plucked out all his hair, and after 12 years of fasting, gained omniscience. Paul Davies’s exhilarating book, The New Physics, contains another of the elements which a modern encyclopedia needs. It has unhurried, meditative and occasionally even humorous articles by the people who are actually re-inventing the limits of ...”

“... For those too young – or too old – to remember, Mandy Rice-Davies had a walk-on part in the Great Profumo Scandal of 1963. Now she has published a racily ghosted autobiography. It says nothing of much interest about anything or anybody that matters, and paints the predictable sympathetic picture of a fun-loving girl more sinned against than sinning ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... connected with the nuclear power movement seemed grotesque. But then there is the story of Pat Davies of Slough. She was married to a sailor on the Resolution, a nuclear submarine, based at Faslane in Scotland. When her friend, whose husband also sailed on Resolution, had a baby, Pat Davies went to visit her. She was ...”

“... about and benevolent towards one of the last living links with their earlier history. Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse probably never met Schiller, but he could be a character in their stimulating book, which recounts the history of his home town. The name of the town itself does not appear in the title, and rightly so: language and appellation are ...”

“... The most searching questions came from the mild-mannered Labour MP for Croydon Central, Geraint Davies. Ms Astall told Mr Davies flatly: ‘The intellectual property rights are with us and we run the service.’ The exchange continued: Q. Could we keep on using your intellectual property rights for how long and at what ...”

“... the allusion to songs about people in concrete flats seemed an unnecessarily explicit rejection of Paul McCartney, whose favoured vein that had sometimes been, in songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Penny Lane’. McCartney’s compassionate tableaux and jaunty ballads, to be sure, were usually light and occasionally trite as well, but they were at least ...”

“... for their actions? Were they redeemable? Did they have ‘higher susceptibilities’? As Caitlin Davies notes in Bad Girls, her history of Holloway and its inmates, incarcerated women were considered far more difficult to manage than men. Misconduct in Holloway, the prison inspector Arthur Griffiths insisted in 1870, was ‘intensified by hysteria, and those ...”

“... by evil dictators with savage police forces. This is a strong ship-of-fools story, translated by Paul Britten Austin into good English which may have made Malte Moritz a touch more naively self-parodic than Sven Delblanc intended. From Canada comes a beautifully contrived set of parodies of traditional English ghost stories. Robertson ...”

“... event. Generations of schoolchildren and students thumbed their way through their predecessors, Davies and Clark, Woodward and Ensor, and it must be an agreeable thought to the new authors that their books will be selling deep into the 21st century. Paul Langford’s volume invites comparison with Basil Williams’s The ...”

“... if the paper that did so much to help her finally and inadvertently helped do her in. Pete Davies’s lively book, All played out, shows part of the high price our polity is paying for the behaviour of newspapers like the Sun. The book tells the story of the England football team’s campaign to win the 1990 World Cup; to write it, ...”

“... on Schumann’s debt to Romantic aesthetics, particularly as epitomised by the novels of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul). Nicholas Marston, writing on Schumann’s heroes Schubert, Beethoven and Bach, quotes the 19-year-old composer telling Wieck: ‘when I play Schubert, it’s as if I were reading a novel ...”