“... Veterans of Foreign Texts.) The question is, how much can be made of realism? How much theoretical weight can it be given? Putnam thinks that it comes in just two basic forms. ‘Metaphysical realism’ is the view that we can conceive of the world in some way quite independent of our own theories and the terms in which we describe it, and raise the question ...”

“... and natural gifts. His mother told the story of watching him as a boy trying to lift too heavy a weight and muttering, in the words of Theseus: ‘If my heart comes out of my body it shall come up.’ Powell’s self-assessments are disarmingly plentiful and that may be counted one of the strengths of the book. Of his brother, about to die of peritonitis at ...”

“... but if the material which I, and the Prime Minister, have been reading is representative, then the weight of ‘serious scientific opinion’ is on the side of the following propositions. First, while it is impossible to remove all danger of damaging, even disastrous, outcomes, the risks involved in GM production are significantly less than they are claimed to ...”

“... then retire to a hilltop and watch the enemy’s position collapse seemingly under its own weight. Hence his sapping of the 17th-century Polish poet Casimir Sarbiewski: a little plagiarism exposed and suddenly a whole chapter of Polish literary history falls in and has to be rewritten. Hence too, more famously, his essay on Lady Chatterley’s ...”

“... Morpurgo picked it up – made the story even more delicious. Such misreportings can’t bear the weight of any real censure. But the slackness extends to areas where its consequences are more disturbing. The Chatterley episode inspires the author to a spiteful digression on the Leavises. As is well known, F.R. Leavis, for his own good reasons, declined to ...”

“... book his study most brings to mind, in the end, is not another anthropological work but Clockers, Richard Price’s best-selling novel about the Jersey City crack trade. In many ways, indeed, In Search of Respect out-does Clockers. Bourgois did not merely report on East Harlem, after all; he lived there with his wife and child for four years, researching the ...”

“... pay for sleeping with him once by sleeping with him again. The second encounter is miserable: his weight on her body; his bachelor’s bedroom; the spine of the books facing her on the bed. Why did she stay for that third pint? Was it out of awkwardness that she helped Duggan take off her underwear, ‘even though [she] was at the time saying no and he was ...”

“... hooks, grappling irons and chains, to no avail. In the end, they resorted to swinging a lead weight smeared with tallow to pick up faint ‘impressions’ of coral, like a brass rubbing made with a wax crayon. Darwin cited these observations as proof that corals could not grow more than thirty fathoms down. In truth, he had already conceived his theory ...”

“... ground. Soon after the end of the Cold War, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle proclaimed that the strategic aim of the US should be to prevent any peer competitor to the US emerging anywhere in the world by means of unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority. This doctrine was amplified by Colin ...”

“... forums with a couple of dozen other stalwarts to listen to them – the likes of Séamus Healy, Richard Boyd Barrett and Thomas Pringle, all now catapulted into the Dáil with a mandate to disturb the political peace. While the Fianna Fáil aristocracy were punching their cards at local meetings and stealthily ascending the party ladder, these newcomers ...”

“... dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends with Yvette’s funeral at the turn of the millennium. A narrative spanning nearly 60 ...”

“... the face of this insanity, a test case was brought by the ‘Stonehenge Two’, Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, who had been charged with ‘trespassory assembly’. It reached the House of Lords in 1999, where it was decided in their favour on the basis that the right to use the public highway for any reasonable purpose was ‘an issue of fundamental ...”

“... Okker, spoke out against these efforts, she was fired and replaced with a DeSantis appointee, Richard Corcoran, a former Speaker of the House who served as education commissioner during DeSantis’s first term. The only faculty member on the board of trustees resigned in protest after five professors were denied tenure by the trustees at the request of ...”

“... to furnish him with the information he had requested, Joyce resorted to memory. He knew Byrne’s weight because on the evening when Byrne had scaled the railings of 7 Eccles Street, he and Joyce had both weighed themselves, ‘at Joyce’s suggestion, at a penny-in-the-slot weighing machine at a chemist on the corner of Frederick Street’. Since Joyce ...”

“... of Shakespeare’s career and in different sorts of scene each of these pressures has a different weight, and it takes great critical delicacy – of a kind which has much in common with that of a theatre director or a conductor – to determine exactly how they press against each other. Shakespeare also frequently melted strands of imagery together so that ...”