“... Ussher was simply deploying the best scholarly practice of his time. Today’s earth scientists may use radiometric dating, but they are driven by the same motive as Ussher: the quest for an accurate and detailed chronology. Rudwick emphasises the positive, or at least unobstructive, role of religion since Ussher, correcting the received idea that the 19th ...”

“... ripe for resolution, often because the necessary laboratory techniques have just come on stream. Robert Koch’s choice of anthrax in 1873 is a brilliant instance of this. Thanks to anthrax, he founded bacteriology as a science and in little over a decade catapulted himself from the life of a rural doctor in a small town in Posen – a province of the Second ...”

“... The difference between the Girard-Cadière case and the sexual abuse scandals of our own day, it may seem, is no more than a matter of media technology. Yet the trial itself turned on Cadière’s claims to have experienced miracles, visions and divine possession, and involved testimony obtained during an exorcism. Both Cadière and Girard were accused of ...”

“... cries beautifully, he is talking about his daughter: ‘She is my great happiness.’ The beauty may be Isabel’s projection at the time: this man is courting her and he has lovely manners. The suspicious reader – or the informed rereader – will feel it is just part of Osmond’s nasty, cramped, aesthetic act. What the adverb isn’t – and the same ...”

“... his allies viewed his survival as a providential blessing and political imperative. The civil wars may be considered a pivotal moment in British medicine, but victory and survival could still usefully be attributed to God. The​ final part of Battle-Scarred deals with ‘the hidden human costs’ of the civil wars – the psychologically damaged, the ...”

“... The standard critique that contemporary society is swamped by spectacle, by images directed at us, may also have to be revised. If power today depends largely on data – on invisible information harvested, searched, surveilled and acted on by corporations, governments, insurance companies, credit agencies and police departments – how are we to track it, let ...”

“... line of communication’ (stärkster Verbindung) with the castle. The wrong destination may, after all, be the right one; and in another sense, too, since K. falls asleep and dreams that he is wrestling with a naked castle official who resembles a Greek god. It’s all to no avail. The next morning, Bürgel can’t wait to get rid of him, and he is ...”

“... ventures of Ben Jonson – Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Thomas Dekker and Henry Porter, and Robert II, with Henry Chettle – now just bodiless titles in an old theatrical ledger. The case of Marlowe is, as always, more ambiguous. In some senses we can be grateful. Seven of his plays remain, and there is no real evidence that any whole works have been ...”

“... which has now appeared, abridged and translated, as Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter; and Robert Ferguson’s Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (1987). Žagar’s assessment doesn’t seem fair to Ferguson and Kolloen (unless the latter’s original version differs substantially from this one), neither of whom pulls many punches, though she aims a few ...”

“... which appeared under Mr Major’s name in various newspapers during the campaign – which may be why they read better than some examples of the genre. Nevertheless, these sorts of book are in perpetual danger of sliding from hard-nosed reportage into a glutinous ‘lives of the saints’ approach to their subjects and their immediate ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... concerned with the seemingly deep issue Schrödinger discussed. The pioneers of molecular biology may have imported analytical attitudes and techniques from the physical sciences, but they were problem-solvers, working at the laboratory bench to tease out the mechanism of heredity. Perutz, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the ...”

“... is too highbrow. Instead of Germaine Greer, there is Navratilova. When a poet does scrape in, like Robert Frost, all one needs to know is that he was famous, not why. Success matters more than states of the soul; the successsful are the pagan gods of ordinary life. The reader is judged to need ‘real’ facts, the kind Mrs Thatcher wants schoolchildren to be ...”

“... people – what they are like as sources of testimony, whether and in what circumstances they may be trusted.’ Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a ...”

“... author, William Jackson, a prominent figure in Exeter musical life. In a letter of 3 October 1799 Robert Southey sent Coleridge the unusual story he had recently heard from Jackson. At the age of 16 Bampfylde had gone to see the composer in Exeter, and had astonished him with his remarkable powers of improvisation on the harpsichord. Even after taking ...”