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“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had ...”

“... him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain ...”

“... a stimulus that elicits an automatic response’, he wrote. ‘You become all attention, which means that you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention … For the cultivated eye, the picture repeats its instantaneous unity like a mouth repeating a single word.’ The genius of ...”

“... suggest that events in Korea in late 1950 brought the US to the brink of nuclear war. Whatever he means when he writes that ‘the knife-edge that Truman had been walking suddenly terminated above an abyss,’ the fact is that the American nuclear arsenal remained in the US under lock and key. Still, Truman was in a fix. He had initially characterised Korea ...”

“... else is bilge’ (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means ‘soft white cheese’). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. ‘My ...”

“... and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the ...”

“... a hundred crowns, but not a penny performed . . . Then, after all this, there was by my only means set down unto the Lord Keeper and the Lord of Buckhurst the notablest and vildest articles of atheism that I suppose the like were never known or read of in any age, all which I can show unto you. They were delivered to Her Highness, and command given by ...”

“... an aversion to making decisions, especially difficult decisions involving confrontation – which means nearly all leadership decisions. In the latter half of both books Corbyn is increasingly absent, and his decisions, when he does make them, are Delphic. He sometimes seems irritated by having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even ...”

“... prevent legislative paralysis – the so-called gridlock. The persistence of the old party labels means little as of now, and will probably mean even less in the future as four de facto parties continue to develop under two party labels. As for the Clinton Presidency, its failure can be dated very exactly to 26 August 1994, when the last attempt to enact ...”

“... that property was a crime, but sponging and bad landlordship were not. G.M. Trevelyan had a David and Saul relationship of some intensity with his brother Charles, the wenching socialist baronet, who suffered from depression and aristocratic bad temper and wilfulness. If anything could have cured him of progressivism, it would have been the sight of his ...”

“... charged that Linnaeus had reduced plant sexuality to a mnemonic principle of classification by means of which ‘one man’s experience may be communicated to others, and the objects safely reasoned on while absent’. His system failed to achieve the dimensions of a philosophy, since it did not reveal the ‘constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex ...”

“... terms. Though known as ‘lucky Jack Aubrey’ from a few early prize-money successes, he is by no means generally fortunate, on sea or land, and the nature of his embarrassments are accurately typical of the Navy and of English society at the time. Like Farrell, O’Brian has solved in his own individual way the intractable problem of getting history – in ...”

“... and by far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 ...”

“... emphasises, ‘evolution’ was not a single idea, and the history of thinking about it has by no means been a simple story of the triumph of science over superstition. In the early Victorian period, it was geology, rather than biology, that set the pace. Clergymen were among the many who loved getting out their geological hammers and specimen bags, but what ...”