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“... Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, the very title was fighting talk: ideas, in the mannerly Austen? Charles Dickens is nowhere more unregenerately English than in his genial philistinism, allergic to anything that smacks of the doctrinal rather than the affective, while Thackeray was unerringly picked off by Leavis for his ‘clubman’s wisdom’. If ...”

“... companion of the Princess Ghika at the Villa Gamberaia up in Settignano. The philosopher, Charles Strong, his college mate, who had married a Rockefeller daughter, showed up.’ It’s like watching the suitcases rotate in an international airport. Miss Blood comes round again a hundred pages and a half a dozen years later, writing to Gertrude Stein ...”

“... our knowledge of ourselves. But he had done so in the sense of Musil or Joyce, rather than Darwin or Einstein.To demonstrate the difference, Timpanaro took for his object a text that Freud himself declared to be not only an indispensable part of his theory as a whole, but which he claimed had found more general acceptance than any other, The ...”

“... it was: not only solitary reproduction but self-regeneration. Among the highest forms of life – Charles I, say, or Louis XVI – to cut in two is to kill; but to divide the LCS in two is to stimulate a process of infinite growth, ‘unbounded extension’, apparent immortality. Alongside this representation of the Society as unbounded, however, there is ...”

“... not conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach’ – and Charles Darwin’s friends understood that his uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life. Historical tradition had tended to associate indigestion and related ailments with certain sorts of people, but new democratic elements were ...”

“... He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I didn’t. ‘Try The Counterlife,’ Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom said to me, ‘I’ve ...”

“... British art schools were in the stained glass department, overseen by a dynamic young teacher, Charles Carey. Boty’s switch of disciplines was, Kristal suggests, ‘the most important choice of her creative life’. Carey was an inspiring teacher and stained glass was having a moment in the avant-garde. Almost the only form of decoration acceptable to ...”

“... men seem to take second billing to the wall where the giants of Victorian science are gathered – Darwin, Huxley and Lyall, each whiskered too but each with an unmistakable half-smile playing about his lips. There’s not much doubt which is the winning side. Nowhere on either wall is space found for Walter Bagehot (1826-77). Yet G.M. Young, that hallowed ...”

“... of the brightest, Major Dwight Eisenhower, retreated to Washington after a few years. The oddest, Charles Willoughby, who had begun life as Karl von Tscheppe-Weidenbach, was the son of a German father and an American mother. A fussy one-time historian with a thick accent and pince-nez on a silk cord, he became MacArthur’s intelligence chief, and stayed ...”