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“... Martha Nussbaum, with her Sixties sensibilities, responded to a New York Times op-ed article by Richard Rorty, a relatively senior philosopher who identifies with the Old Left of the Forties. Rorty had urged young Americans, especially Leftists, to cease denigrating the value of patriotism and take seriously the ‘emotion of national pride’ as essential ...”

“... chill aperçu that the reason ‘emulation and contention’ were endemic among anatomists may have been that ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects’, rendered them ‘less able to bear contradiction’. The daring of Outram’s undertaking, by contrast, lies precisely in its reaching for the parts specialist history of ...”

“... himself on a winning streak when he opened Rawlinson Poet MS 160. The fact that the poem is bad may be an embarrassment. Robin Robbins’s attack on arguments for its authorship based on parallels may be – is – convincing. But no one has positively disproved Shakespeare’s involvement, and given the conventional ...”

“... the customs of a remote tribe. She is keenly aware that, as anthropologists have often done, she may be asking the wrong questions, and relying too heavily on modern analogies or notions. Her task is further complicated because there are no living natives to study or examine. The ancients speak to us, but cannot answer our inquiries; virtually every text ...”

“... up as criminal? Would amateurs with the professional skills of James Murray, Frederick Furnivall, Richard Chenevix Trench – if they exist today – be foolish enough in this post-Thatcherite world to give away the fruits of their labour? Why slave to make future generations of OUP publishers rich? Nor, with the economic short-termism that they must nowadays ...”

“... campaign for the mayoralty, which the long-serving Tom Bradley is about to relinquish. Businessman Richard Riordan, one of 24 candidates to succeed him, seems to be promising that all the unpleasantness of South Central will somehow be removed. He puts it less plainly even than this, however: his paid-for advertising slots include a sound-bite in which a ...”

“... minimalist works, and to some extent of Einstein. When you look at what’s being repeated, you may wonder at the tolerance of those who can happily sit for ten or 15 minutes at a stretch listening to the same commonplace two or four-beat figure over and over, without audible variation. Compare the opening of Akhnaten with the introduction to Handel’s ...”

“... which the novel creates its fevered satirical vision. It’s reminiscent, in different ways, of Richard Brautigan and of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, as well as of Burroughs, but it seems not to have been a way of writing she wanted to continue with. One of the strengths of the new collection is that it contains the unfinished draft of the novel Quin was writing ...”

“... in 1991. A loss of trust in experts is the hallmark of the risk society. Whatever scientists may say, miasmas are still thought to assault and pollutants to poison. But pinning them down as allergens has not been easy. Research results have been counterintuitive. Studies of allergy incidences in the two parts of Germany soon after the fall of the Berlin ...”

“... new material on Lenin’s more bloodthirsty and ruthless side (see The Unknown Lenin, edited by Richard Pipes) or even the human side uncovered by Service. Lewin might also be called Leninist in his analysis of what went wrong with the Soviet Union: bureaucratism spoiled everything. ‘Bureaucracy’ has always been a dirty word in Soviet vocabulary, and ...”

“... patronising and taken not a blind bit of notice. And so on, round and round. The 1960s generation may have had a dream, but it would seem from the contemporary sixth-former’s point of view that they didn’t achieve it. It would also seem that they have become dream-bound in relation to their past. Sheila Rowbotham’s memoir of the 1960s is an attempt to ...”

“... the population of Birmingham rose from 15,000 to 70,000. The ironworks in which he had an interest may have failed but with his involvement Bage had taken a stake in the future. Older attitudes lingered, however. A reviewer of Joseph Priestley’s Memoirs claimed in 1806 that ‘there is something universally presumptuous in provincial genius.’ It wasn’t ...”

“... the logic might work the other way round: that’s to say, the experiences of everyday life may influence our brain structures or activities. It has been found that the posterior part of the hippocampus of black-cab drivers is enlarged by comparison with a control group (though one London cabbie told us he didn’t believe a word of it as he’d been a ...”

“... surely Attlee’s most important speech, after Chamberlain, deserted by ninety of his own MPs in May 1940, appealed to Attlee to join him in a national government. Attlee’s reply (‘Prime minister, our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either’) was what made Churchill prime minister – as fateful ...”

“... supported by the money his brother made. His even greater good fortune was to have an uncle, Richard Lloyd, who believed in him and backed him, convinced that he was a prodigy – an opinion Lloyd George shared. From the earliest days, there were scandals relating to affairs and paternity suits to be hushed up; the list of his conquests would include ...”