Search Results

“... George Berkeley’s claim that things exist only when they are being perceived has a lot to do with his Irishness. There are Irish people nowadays who cross the street when they see a priest approaching; but Ireland has traditionally been an intensely religious nation, and much of its thought, right down to questions of epistemology or political economy, has been influenced by this ...”

“... other panaceas were naive or faddish, for example the enthusiasm of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley for the health benefits of tar-water. The phenomenon of projection is parodied by Berkeley’s fellow Anglo-Irishman Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where projectors at the Academy of Lagado ...”

“... The ‘Irish Salamis’: a commonplace flourish (Yeats) about the clerkly author of Tar  Water (Berkeley). He was sending intelligence out for audition; he believed a win would be good for the nation, the mind of Ireland freed, raw body, old head, albeit Swift died mad. The ‘Irish Salamis’ is a price you must pay for some victory over and above ...”

“... but it was the first decisive African victory. A decade later its earliest historian, Captain George Berkeley, wondered whether Adwa was ‘the first revolt of the Dark Continent against domineering Europe’. In The Battle of Adwa Raymond Jonas goes a step further. Adwa, he claims, not only ensured that Ethiopia would remain the only independent ...”

“... community. Born on 17 May 1749, he was the second son of the marriage between the vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and the daughter of a former vicar of the same parish. Orphaned at the age of five, he attended grammar school and soon became apprentice to a local surgeon. At 21 he moved to London to continue his medical studies as anatomical ...”

“... and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others created the foundations of quantum physics. Yet within less than a decade this moment had passed. Olympian conversations were drowned out by fascist chants. Jewish physicists, led by Einstein, fled ...”

“... but the strong effect is achieved at some cost to depth of understanding. He tells the reader that Berkeley dismissed matter as a metaphysical chimera and then slides at once into the common misperception of Berkeley, in his own century, as denying solidity, tangibility and the like. What is missing here, and from the ...”

“... When Bishop Berkeley wrote his philosophical treatise linking tar-water, that sovereign cure-all, with the sublimest mysteries of the Christian religion, a lay critic said it reminded him of the man who began by talking about Alexander’s battles and ended up by describing an Armenian wheelbarrow. That is how it was in the bar parlour of Wodehouse’s Angler’s Rest: ‘In our little circle I have known an argument on the Final Destination of the Soul to change inside forty seconds into one concerning the best method of preserving bacon fat ...”

“... of call, Singapore, reveals an encounter with an old acquaintance from his high-school days in Berkeley. Despite looking like ‘a street person’, with a ‘warped grin and pigeon walk’ and ‘a posture like a question mark … dressed in layers of baggy, unwashed black polyester’, Keith Stolarsky is in fact extremely rich, as his very attractive ...”

“... cues, arrived drunk, took the wrong places and, in some cases, giggled throughout the ceremony – George IV’s coronation being all the more preposterous for the hammering of his ex-wife-to-be at the gates. In those days, there was much anti-royal sentiment, and what appeared to be tradition was richly scoffed at: an English cartoon of the French Restoration ...”

“... years is likely to have some outstanding people on its list. Trinity has its share, including Berkeley, Swift, Rowan Hamilton, Lecky, Dowden, Bury, Douglas Hyde, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett. Since 1952, and beginning with McConnell, Trinity has gradually acknowledged its responsibility not only to the past but to Irish taxpayers. It has opened its gate for ...”

“... In 2004, with the re-election of George W. Bush, the Republicans seemed invincible. Bush’s consigliere, Karl Rove, interpreted the election as the sign of a realignment and pushed for a hyperconservative politics which would create a ‘permanent Republican majority’. Now, only three years later, in the midst of America’s absurdly long presidential election cycle, the Grand Old Party is in disarray ...”

“... of Anglesey. Amy had borne the Duke a son . . . [she] retaliated by ensnaring the Honourable Berkeley Paget, Lord Anglesey’s brother, who left his wife and children in order to live openly with her’; ‘also in Paris, having run away with and then from Mrs George Lamb, was Henry Brougham’; and so it went on until ...”

“... Palance by Alan Ladd in Shane is exquisite, but Shane as a whole is a phoney. (But its director, George Stevens, did direct a musical that’s a serious candidate for greatness: Swing Time.) And the problem of evaluating the makers is vastly complicated, as it is with the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, by the fact that the creation is usually collaborative ...”

“... We had a rag at Monico’s. We had a rag at the Troc,And the one we had at the Berkeley gave the customers quite a shock.Then we went to the Popular, and after that – oh my!I wish you’d seen the rag we had in the Grill Room at the Cri.John​ Betjeman’s ‘’Varsity Rag’ is a hymn to the bright young things of the 1920s, who roared round London’s smartest venues, baying for broken glass ...”