“... known physical phenomena in a single overarching explanatory scheme. Physicists, in other words, may be running out of things to discover. Every bit of evidence, then, points to the conclusion that science, long regarded as the highest and most genuine species of human knowledge, one of the glories of humanity, is nearing a sort of culmination. All of which ...”

“... it, waiting for Jelal and Rüya to return, and carries on the daily column in Jela’s name. Jelal may have good reasons for lying low. He is an essayist and storyteller rather than a political journalist – which is hardly surprising in a country where, then and now, authors can face imprisonment for exercising their right to political ...”

“... driven by the desperate assumption that in co-operating step by step and delivering the many it may be able to save the few. The offices of the Community are a labyrinth of clattering typewriters and cluttered desks and stacked files, relentlessly grinding out their results of classification and alphabetisation and – the barbaric term fits here ...”

“... Whatever may now be the state of the market for A Shropshire Lad, the poetry of A.E. Housman has certainly been among the most read of the 20th century. Or in the 20th century, for the earlier poems belong to the end of the nineteenth. When A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896, it was at the author’s own expense; presumably it did not then look like work that would attract the public ...”

“... on South Island. The stamp bears two strikes of the Picton cancellation of 21 March 1904, which may have served to disguise its rare quality. Where it went then is a mystery. The package and its address have not survived but perhaps it had the distinction of travelling in one of the last coach and horse mail vans: in 1904 the first combustion engine ...”

“... well-known on Fifth Avenue, gets in, with the young Cristina Iglesias as token promise. People may barely notice, because for decades the PNV’s nationalism has been rousingly defined by exclusion rather than inclusion: that is, by opposition to the Spanish state, from which it has wrung juridical and fiscal privileges that other autonomous ...”

“... I have thought of Belfast as a jail surrounded by drab, cold streets. The fact that my sister May has lived congenially enough in Belfast for many years has not altered my impression of the city. I visited her a few months ago and found it as grim as it was in 1939. But my experience of it, I concede, is limited. I stayed away from Belfast during the ...”

“... A patent agent who has spent his time among the open shelves in the old Science Reference Library may fetch up beside a scholar who has worked equally long on manuscripts but has never seen as much as a hundred running feet of them shelved together. There will still be a kind of hierarchy – although you can ask for a general book in the Rare Books Reading ...”

“... Minor anachronisms, on the other hand (as Selbourne points out in the case of the word arguni), may indicate the addition of new information reaching Jacob in Italy, to which he returned in 1273 to write up his adventures. In Jacob’s case, one would have to include here, swallowing hard, the startling ‘Manci’, an opprobrious Mongol-period term which ...”

“... for a scholar who can pursue so many intellectual interests so constructively. A second reaction may be to be somewhat suspicious of an intellectual agriculture which is extensive rather than intensive. Le Goff arrives, clears the field, crops it and then moves on to the next frontier. Slash-and-burn, rather than the prolonged cultivation of an intellectual ...”

“... and engaged in a very active public life – if his ambition to ‘ruin the great work of Time’ may be thought to qualify for that description. Cromwell’s progression from private to public could be used to illustrate a point Spacks borrows from Habermas (‘individual self-contemplation prepared the way for the assumption of power’), though in the 17th ...”

“... and law. Ziolkowski’s grand comparative idea involves lots of details with which readers may disagree, and many questions remain unanswered. One central issue that deserves more discussion is whether the title is an oxymoron. Can heroes hesitate and still be heroic? Is there any justification for thinking of heroism and hesitation as ...”

“... essay (excluding the appendices, which take up more than a hundred additional pages), but readers may nevertheless conclude that biography too is ‘different and diminished’ in our less than heroic age. Knight treats Nelson’s professional life in a scholarly and thorough fashion, but there is little exalting of anyone. We learn, for example, of the role ...”

“... weren’t always bright enough to think very much at all, and Bessy’s flaw in Arabella’s eyes may be that she thinks too much. The pages Arabella has devoted to her are devastating. For all her efforts to leave her past behind her, it seems Arabella knows exactly who she is. The Bessy section is headed: ‘The Most Particular Case of a Low ...”

“... be the first to welcome the new leader. But then Damascus is presently under such pressure that it may be a waste of time trying to assess how genuine this response is, or whether it was born of a real understanding of the Israeli political scene. It does, however, indicate what hopes attach to his election. Soon similarly positive noises were heard from other ...”