“... weren’t very good on the subject of matter. Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas ...”

“... and spires of the university city flash past, so near and yet so remote. Until the publication of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when ...”

“... and invasion plans. Yet the government wasn’t of one mind. The secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, remained anxious to build better relations with Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England ...”

“... a more permanent exhibit: two earthenware jars. The jars are old and empty now, but you can still read their labels. ‘Sennae P.V.’ one says, ‘Pimento’ the other. Senna is made from the plant Cassia acutifolia which, when swallowed, accelerates the squeezing action of your gut (peristalsis). Your intestine will do all it can to get rid of the stuff ...”

“... and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its ...”

“... of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first drafts, wrote his own poetry. In the early years he still had to explain his revolution to the world – and to himself – and to defend its shifting agenda against a relentless counter-narrative spun out of ...”

“... but while panels are allowed to look at metrics, for the time being they are still expected to read the submitted papers. Citation counts are the best measure of research strength at a large scale – an entire country’s output, say – but they are at best an indirect indicator of quality in individual papers, and they come with all sorts of biases ...”

“... to sound more and more racist.’ As both Benedict and Matoesian proceed, their books begin to read like an attack on clichés as such. Get the clichés and you get the crime. If we consider which clichés are in question (‘virgin’, ‘vamp’, ‘racial monster’), their concern seems understandable. But when Benedict wants to know why the press went ...”

“... stream’ of Victorian periodical writing. More than most directories, the BLM series can be read as literary history. Each volume shows lines of development, innovation, experiment and decay. It was (probably for the surviving remnant still is) an article of Leavisite faith that the health of a culture is gauged by its literary magazines. They reflect ...”

“... a sense of something ‘charged with meaning’. Gray and Whittall believe the phrase should be read as ‘purely friendly relationship to the young lady’. This is much too unambiguous. Wagner’s phrase need not be taken to mean that his relationship was chaste. Doubtless he was teasing Cosima as he dictated. R.J. Hollingdale’s translation of ...”

“... brutal the treatment of children. Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family (1975), now read in many European countries, defiantly announced that mothers have not always loved their offspring. Lawrence Stone, whose book Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) prints some horrifying passages about maternal indifference and neglect. When ...”

“... between one possibility and another, the relation must be logical or internal. In fact, as Richard Rorty remarks in his contribution to Hoy’s collection, Hacking settles for archaeology in the sense of historical analysis, even though he insists on calling it ‘epistemology’ – that is to say, Erkenntnistheorie. For his part, Rorty welcomes the ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... Phoenix’s death in the first story in Palo Alto. He wrote a poem after Ledger died, which he read at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. And he got his big break by playing Dean, in an otherwise mediocre, made-for-cable biopic from 2001, memorable for nothing but the way Franco conveys Dean’s mischievousness along with his vulnerability and anger. That ...”

“... at this time. What does link them, inside their luxuriant variety? The most austere among them, Richard Long, makes his works by walking, shuffling, treading. Many of them have probably been seen only by his camera. He fashioned a circle in the gibber-desert of the Hoggar region of the Sahara by clearing the gravel and shingle, leaving the dusty sand. He ...”