“... quite the right word – it is a kind of authenticity which is invoked here, as though water is more authentic, more real, wetter, drawn from an open-air cistern than from a city tap. The metaphysics of authenticity are a dangerous area. When Mrs Gray opines, ‘Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life ...”

“... several mysterious bouts of ill health. In 1843, he entered the Augustinian monastery of St Thomas at Brünn (now Brno). Obscure though it may be today, Brünn then was no intellectual backwater, and nor was the monastery monastic in the sense of any cloistered withdrawal. Under its liberal and intellectual abbot, F.C. Napp, it had become a major ...”

“... as the most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas Wyatt; but it has to be said that the competition for the top ranking south of the Scottish border is not very fierce, and until the 1930s such a judgment would have struck most people as bizarre. His poetry had come to be little regarded within fifty ...”

“... and the first change of partners in a frantic dance of infidelities, ménages à trois and other more complex triangulations among writers in London that lasted like an epic ‘excuse me’ throughout the Second World War. Bowen later remembered it as the ‘most interesting period of my life’. Lara Feigel unravels the tangled web, concentrating on the ...”

“... 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 ...”