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“... of this century. He lived a rather uneventful life, almost entirely in a university setting: as Paul Levy writes rather wistfully in the introduction to his book, ‘he slew no dragons and rescued no maidens; he did not even have the adventures life allotted to other philosophers like Russell, who went to jail, or Wittgenstein, who went to war.’ The ...”

“... indeed make good 20th-century sense to worship food, but punters of ‘foodism’ (as Ann Barr and Paul Levy jokily dub this phenomenon) are evidently not about to drop to their knees because they are starving.‘Foodies’, according to Barr and Levy, are ‘children of the consumer boom’ who consider ‘food to be ...”

“... terms than ‘happy’ or ‘exciting’ to describe his culinary experiences or suggestions. Paul Levy, another American, who writes on food in the Observer and elsewhere, is a very different animal. I cannot see him sitting down like Olney and sorting a heap of garden peas into two categories, large and small. He has enthusiasm rather than ...”

“... about me – I mean what I feel about my work,’ he wrote to Ottoline Morrell in a letter that Paul Levy has strangely chosen to omit. ‘Perhaps you don’t see that the idea of my really not working is simply an impossibility. Sometimes you have admonished me on the subject, and I think I have been rather curt in my answers; it was because I felt so ...”

“... been harassed by the African children chanting Oyinbo! – which means, roughly, ‘Paleface!’ Paul Levy’s experience, recorded in Finger Lickin’ Good, is not wholly dissimilar. He is food correspondent for the Observer and has written scholarly books about Bloomsbury people: we might suppose him to be British-born, but he was raised in ...”

“... of a family of statistical distributions first identified by the great French probability theorist Paul Lévy, who had been one of Mandelbrot’s professors at the Ecole Polytechnique in the 1940s. Lévy was not a charismatic teacher – from the back of a lecture theatre ‘he was near inaudible,’ Mandelbrot says – but Mandelbrot persisted, at one point ...”

“... I could dream of’. The result was alluring but also eccentric. Hodgkin had what his friend Paul Levy described as a ‘weird’ predilection for chairs – these included a Venetian gondola seat, a colonial chair and a plastic tulip armchair from the 1950s – which he was forever moving around. He made lampshades out of cheap white plastic ...”

“... It is odd that Lytton Strachey did not manage to strike up much fellow-feeling for Prospero. In an essay of 1904 on Shakespeare’s final period we find the puncturing remark (uncharacteristic of later deflationary measures only in the diffidence of the opening phrase): ‘To an irreverent eye, the ex-Duke of Milan would perhaps appear as an unpleasantly crusty personage, in whom a twelve years’ monopoly of the conversation had developed an inordinate propensity for talking ...”

“... from two pieces, dropped from the English edition, on his friends Philippe Sollers and Jean-Paul Enthoven), Lévy only engages in discussions of the political philosopher Luc Ferry and with Régis Debray, and perhaps because he suspects that this is too lowkey, he ends the book with a nostalgic touch – a flashback to Althusser’s mysticism. Since the ...”

“... of Mathematics of the Soviet Union. Two other French mathematicians are present, Arnaud Denjoy and Paul Montel, who had supervised Szolem’s PhD thesis. The others at the dinner table are Benoit’s father (second from left, referred to throughout as ‘Father’), his grandfather Szlomo, the white-bearded patriarch of the family who spoke only Yiddish, and ...”

“... material world, with no one to contemplate it, is better if it is beautiful than if it is ugly. Paul Levy, in his biography of Moore, charges that Russell’s paper attacks a position that Moore did not hold.* He says that the paper ‘badly misrepresented the views Moore had expressed the week before’ and goes on to construct a puzzle about ‘how ...”

“... but eggs benedict, or scrambled eggs and bacon. But there is also poetry in the genuinely exotic. Paul Levy once held out reverently to me between his finger and thumb a small object, of indeterminate colour, and urged me to bite it. It tasted of nothing at all, but when I pointed this out he brushed the objection away with tolerant disdain. ‘That is ...”

“... its most visible and charismatic face. This group evolved into Médecins sans frontières, which Paul Berman describes in Power and the Idealists (2005) as ‘a more political Red Cross – a Red Cross willing to identify the political realities that create humanitarian crises’. In general, Kouchner thought, the left should not sit around while people got ...”

“... After his rapid demise, she transferred her admiration to the nationalist poet and agitator Paul Déroulède, her hero during the Dreyfus Affair, during which she had the time of her life, devoting her talents as satirist and cartoonist to the anti-semitic cause. Finally, she gave grudging approval to the radical Clemenceau – ‘A real Frenchman, very ...”

“... belief and devastating disillusion, because he had grown up in a family with a resident guru, one Paul Brunton or P.B. Masson’s tantalising remarks about this unusual upbringing have been fleshed out in My Father’s Guru, and it’s a dilly. There have been memoirs before about growing up in a narrow sect – one thinks of Edmund Gosse and the Plymouth ...”