“... but he was rarely in a position to do his own research. Today only his most dedicated fans will read the Pseudodoxia from cover to cover, but it’s useful for showing how gradually the practices we have come to think of as scientific method emerged from older ways of thinking. Wittgenstein, speaking of the transition between his earlier and later ...”

“... the fascinating account of the colonisation of Barbados published in 1657 by the English agent Richard Ligon. Many planters remained nervous about bringing religion to their slaves in the 18th century. Even as some argued that Africans were naturally inferior to whites, planters feared they would lose their powers to enslave when their workers became ...”

“... signs were everywhere in the convention hall, along with such charming items as a button that read: ‘Hillary KFC Special: No breasts, fat thighs and a left wing’. Chris Christie convened a Salem witch trial – a revival of The Crucible is currently a hit on Broadway – with the conventioneers howling ‘Guilty!’ and ‘Lock her up!’ as Christie ...”

“... world remained enchanted. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic is still a delight to read, but the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ has only become harder to sustain in the fifty years since it was published. Indeed, the book did much to define popular religion as a richly diverse scatter of customs and practices, and to explain ...”

“... of Buckley provoked discontent in right-wing reviewers (once they had given it a ‘Washington read’ and searched for their names in the index). Not all the facts of the life were convenient. What appeared to be a career on the permanent offensive looked somewhat different when viewed at longer range. The same Buckley who swooned over McCarthy was ...”

“... in psychological terms and a feat of artistic integration. Roth was ‘furious’ when he read the article. How furious? He ‘thought of ending the analysis entirely’. In other words, nothing changed. That’s not normally the way fury takes Philip Roth. It seems likely that Kleinschmidt, even in the offending article, was giving Roth general ...”

“... of the experiment in tripartite government is relentlessly laid out. It is not an easy read, but two aspects of it are especially striking all this time later. One is the sense of an age that has utterly passed. For those who lived through it, there’s a grisly horror in being forced to remember a long-gone mantra like ‘Stage Three of the ...”

“... Two days before making this statement the President awarded the National Security medal to Richard Helms, the former CIA Director who had been fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended jail sentence for lying to Congress.4 Casey himself has been awarded the CIA’s highest medal for bringing ‘imagination to our operation’.5 Reagan’s open ...”

“... an interpretation rather than a given. (The best description of this theme in modern thought is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) Derrida, in criticising ‘presence’ and ‘Western Metaphysics’, is, along with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sellars and Quine, criticising the ‘myth of the given’ – the myth that knowledge can be ...”

“... and Goldman appears to mean it, at the time. But it is not what he turns out to mean. One needs to read no further than twenty pages into the book to realise that Goldman’s true feelings involve a rearrangement of his terms. What he really means is that ‘mass culture’s deep atavistic longing for royalty has betrayed American democracy.’ This it has ...”

“... Howe has shown that he has the courage of Mr Healey’s convictions.’ Personally, I do not read British economic policy since the war as having been quite as single-mindedly obtuse as Pollard maintains. The weaknesses have been wider and deeper. Rather than continuity, Thatcherism represents a perverse reaction to a misreading of those weaknesses, all ...”

“... The answer is that it is an inept rendering of the sexual term jouissance in the translation by Richard Miller in which Anglophone readers regularly misread Barthes’s Plaisir du Texte, though it’s true that no single English word gives the full sense of ‘active pleasure’, with specific associations of orgasm, of Barthes’s usage. Barthes isn’t ...”

“... lushly ‘pagan’ and pastoral. Still, Reid is as much a part of the ‘Arcadian’ tradition as Richard Jeffries, author of Bevis, who does get in. Carpenter’s claims for the authors under consideraton, perhaps, are not always justified. However, his critical manner is in many respects exemplary: sharp, resourceful, diverting and illuminating. Dryness and ...”

“... from his mind?’ The point is not that Dodsworth does not have a coherent argument. When read more than once, the structure of his case reveals itself more clearly: connections between bodies, dead bodies and bodies soon to die; subtle routes by which the practice of honourable conduct is lost and then, degenerate but still noble, is represented and ...”

“... the reader often has the opportunity of checking both their facts and their hypotheses. They have read widely and sometimes critically, and they even assure us that they have reached some of their more sensational conclusions with reluctance. The field they cover is vast, and there is one drawback of a work of historical detection on this scale from which ...”