At the same time, in abrupt digressions, the cosmos churned, oceans teemed, nebulae exploded.

NEWYORKER: Commitments

Still, this is not a book for readers with a low tolerance for long digressions.

FORBES: Don't Go Near The Volcano

Cook is an engaging writer, and he peppers his high-tech detective story with digressions both rich and entertaining.

FORBES: Newton's Laws, Upended

And yet these are, by the time they are published, distractions and digressions.

ECONOMIST: Cheques and imbalances

Mr. Burton often employs digressions from digressions from digressions, so that his themes, like a Russian nesting doll, lie embedded within successive shells of narrative.

WSJ: Robert Burton | The Anatomy of Melancholy | Digressions on a Diagnosis | Masterpiece by Danny Heitman

There are intriguing digressions, too, into the lives of great butterfly hunters of the past, and an engaging account of some recent developments in butterfly conservation.

ECONOMIST: Butterflies

The digressions that pepper the book are sometimes fascinating.

ECONOMIST: Modern physics

Inevitably bulky, given its scope, his book is so bloated by asides, digressions, polemics and hobbies that it is positively obese, and this makes it a hard book to review justly.

ECONOMIST: A master of evolution takes a last long look at Darwin