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“... a tumour virus actually made tumours grow. He happened to work in the same laboratory as Hamilton Smith, who had succeeded in isolating and purifying an enzyme similar to Arber’s. Nathans therefore borrowed some of it to cut his long viral DNA chain into shorter pieces. After that he put the fragments on a strip of wet blotting-paper and passed an electric ...”

“... insurance for those of 50 and over’. Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the minimum, isn’t wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names. 17 ...”

“... repository of the Reithian BBC’s nationalised moralism and authority. The following week, Joan Smith pursued a similarly dangerous line in the Independent on Sunday: ‘In recent days ... those of us who are not willing to pretend to emotions we don’t feel have been getting an ominous message – that we ought to keep quiet. It’s a message which is not ...”

“... The early story of this company is told by Po Bronson. Two young would-be entrepreneurs, Jack Smith and Sabeer Bahtia, ‘had been brainstorming possible business ideas for a few months’. One of their problems was not being able to exchange information over e-mail while at their respective workplaces, because they didn’t want their bosses to find out ...”

“... in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don’t think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he ...”

“... to All Quiet on the Western Front. But he died in 1970, leaving it unfinished: a massive stub. Michael Hofmann, his translator, recalls some other unfinished fictions. But this is not The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Man without Qualities. Those two books lack their ends, but what remains doesn’t feel raw or rough; they simply break off. The Promised ...”

“... general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast. ‘Conrad and Me’, a script which I hone and burnish in slack moments, has the following points of mild ...”

“... Party and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour Party de jure and others de facto. It was a measure both of the successes of the Conservative Party in the Eighties and the apparent decay of the social-democratic and Marxist alternatives that such a popular front was ...”

“... a sandboy. I could have imagined him swapping jests and odd bits of learning with Logan Pearsall Smith, the author of Trivia, and spellbinding the old dilettante with the tale, told tongue in cheek, of how a misdiagnosis giving him only a few more months to live had set him writing a few light novels to help support the missus after he’d gone ... Droll ...”

“... says, In an illuminating page or two of self-analysis (it’s supposed to be about someone called Michael, but his brother is so sure it’s about himself that he changes that name to Patrick): ‘Sometimes he deliberately set out to hate people, and though hating by all the rules of warfare seemed the proper thing to do, it was always a failure with ...”

“... such as Prescott, Blunkett and Hain merged into the Blairite mass or, like Margaret Beckett, Michael Meacher and Kinnock himself, became bit players on the political stage, Cook remained a prominent and prickly reminder of the electoral calculations that had won Blair the leadership in 1994. In this respect, he was undoubtedly helped by being banished to ...”

“... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... In 1864, he won a Snell Exhibition, which had sent many brilliant students – not least Adam Smith – from Glasgow University to Balliol College, Oxford. The high churchmanship of Oxford often unsettled the Presbyterian certainties of the Balliol Scotch; Archibald Campbell Tait, an exhibitioner of a previous generation, even ended up as the archbishop ...”

“... Maxwell discusses the implications of his embryonic electrodynamic theory. He writes excitedly to Michael Faraday about his discovery that, according to his own theory, electric and magnetic fields would propagate with a speed that appeared to be identical with the speed of light – from which he concludes, as he states in a subsequent letter to ...”