“... for whose empirical method Heinroth had considerable respect: William Perfect (1737-1809) and Thomas Arnold (1742-1816) particularly. (He, called William Perfect the ‘Nestor of English practitioners’.) Why then, the villainy? The answer is that, against the grain of the Enlightenment tradition which preceded him, Heinroth wished to restate, in a ...”

“... not least to do with hunting, which were at odds with France’s national legal code, and all the more fiercely protected for that. More controversial was the war cemetery with its rows of white and black crosses: white for those who had died fighting for France, black for the boys who had been taken off in lorries from ...”

“... account does not describe a Masonic network of power. What he finds are churches that seem more forlorn than powerful, and display hardly any sense of a unifying purpose. Almost everywhere outside Poland, the priests he meets have their backs to the wall. Not only does unbelief flourish, so do different forms of religious nationalism. Varied species of ...”

“... it. To be sure, his rejection of all forms of reductive materialism concerning the mind is much more circumspect than was Descartes’. Searle wants no part of any dualism of substances. Rather, he makes the bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by the neurophysiological activities of the brain. He calls this ‘Biological ...”

“... were there, among other reasons, to check the performance of a small jewelled watch, barely more than five inches in diameter, carried with them all the way from London. This timepiece, finished by the expert clockmaker Larcum Kendall at the end of 1769 after 30 months of painstaking work, promised a solution to the enduring puzzle of longitude, the way ...”

“... me round the ‘museum’ beneath the monument. On display, among ancient helmets and armour, were more modern uniforms, slashed or bullet-riddled, which had been worn by fallen Iraqi soldiers. It was Good Friday and I meditated upon the wounds of Christ. Some of the Arab poets with me lit up cigarettes, but the senior army officers present frowned. The ...”

“... over Eliot’s assertion, in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), that ‘the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’ But ‘the ...”

“... why, therefore, did not such misfortunes affect everybody equally? Why, moreover, were some people more successful than others when they manifestly didn’t work any harder? This recalcitrant ‘Why me?’ question of the particularity and selectivity of ill and good fortune was what Zande set out to solve in terms of witchcraft, or, in the case of their ...”

“... in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel. It is the 1920s. Timothy Harcombe, the narrator, works with his father Clement, a faith-healer, at the Chemical Theatre ...”

“... literature?’, questions which, difficult enough in themselves, lead inevitably to questions even more awkward, such as ‘what is a subject?’ And it is admitted that these difficulties are compounded by the obscurity, held to be necessary in at least some cases, of many of the texts that explore them.It would seem that the present collection is somewhat at ...”

“... side with works of poetry and fiction, and it never occurred to me to think of one being less or more “humane” than the other.’For a long stretch, though, of his childhood and early adolescence, Auden liked to present himself as the icily preoccupied boy-boffin, his playbox ‘full of thick scientific books on geology, metals and machines’. He ...”

“... the continuing democratic vigour of the American novel is that the great wave of Modernism was no more than a ripple by the time it reached New England’s shores. American writers simply did not have the time or energy to spare for all that self-scrutiny and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was ...”

“... with Aristotle’s distinction, and notes its influence on Catholic theology. But he overlooks a more interesting theological aspect of the accidental, which is the doctrine of Creation. This has nothing to do with how the world got started, which is the domain of the scientist. It has to do with the fact that for Christian belief, everything in the world ...”

“... least a chance that in forming this image your imagination will have tapped into a picture that is more than five hundred years old – Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of the outlandish pachyderm, made in 1515. Dürer himself never saw a rhino. He too had to imagine the beast, so your imaginings might have something to do with his imaginings, which ‘bodied forth ...”

“... murals to challenge the prevailing narrative of Washington’s life and, indeed, American history more broadly. His murals were intended to show that the country’s economic growth and territorial expansion – Washington took part in both – rested on the exploitation of slave labour and the violent seizure of Native American land. Among ...”