“... concern with Jenner as heroic scientist. An alternative view of the life emerges if one takes a more critical look at the factual evidence available. Fisher makes no attempt to analyse how Jenner manoeuvred himself through potentially adverse circumstances to a position of maximum advantage, and reveals himself as a sophist of some excellence in his ...”

“... of conspicuously precious materials and designed, as he puts it deliciously, to ‘chirrup’. Thomas Nashe characteristically pushes Marlowe’s conceit still further, describing in The Unfortunate Traveller the internal mechanism of a whole forest full of shrill-breasted artificial birds: Who, though they were bodies without souls, and sweet-resembled ...”

“... would have excised an occasional sentence as repetitious or otiose. But that would have had no more substantial effect than a craftsman’s final polishing. The monolith remains, in a sense beyond criticism, simply there, an Ayer’s Rock of scholarship. Most large books can safely be skipped through or skimmed, by all but the most conscientious reader. In ...”

“... the market order was a kind of nostalgia, bound to fail in practice. In reality, neoliberalism was more often dishonest, proclaiming its absolute adherence to the rule of the market, only to fall back on massive state intervention. The bank bailouts of 2008 were a case in point. Under modern conditions neoliberalism is, de facto, an anti-democratic ...”

“... are four of his 18 chapters devoted to religion and theology? Brookes explains. Christianity was more fervent and theology more challenging after the Test Act was repealed. Does one detect the faint distaste of the historian for the social sciences? No mention of Keynes’s circus, a veil over anthropology after ...”

“... benefit. An ecologist might suspect that Cole’s theories and plans will prove to be outdated more rapidly than Cobbett’s pragmatic approach to the details of human life. Cobbett was a regimental sergeant-major before he was thirty and his politics and journalism carry the marks of this rank and profession. One of the characteristics is an awareness of ...”

“... his place in a long line of writers, calls the ‘last chief’ of the Comanches. It might be more accurate to call him the first chief, but that would diminish the mythological attraction. Quanah’s prominence in recent popular accounts owes as much to his being the half-breed child of a captive white woman as to his prowess as a war leader. The romance ...”

“... mountain left their houses. Carrying their household belongings and all the food they could find, more than eight hundred families set out one night in 1915 to climb Musa Dagh. On the plateau, they began to dig trenches, and to distribute the few firearms they had managed to hide from Turkish searches. Elsewhere, one and a half million Armenians were being ...”

“... rather than anything as orthodox or foreseeable as a ‘development’. And there’s nothing more fruitful than a timely mutation. The late Angela Carter once told me I was a ‘formalist’. We didn’t meet often, and this may have been the first time we did, in which case it was at a party. It had slipped my mind that I don’t smoke, and I cadged a ...”

“... fighting, did not know what was lost, did not indeed know that anything was lost. But who was the more tragic, or who was more damned – the man who knew it, or the man who did not?’ Some of us, forced into such a formulation, might conclude the former, but it is Dr P. who is Sacks’ choice. This is not just a personal ...”

“... De Doctrina Christiana is a vast, detailed record of his thought on the subject he considered more important than any other. He put an enormous amount of time and effort into this treatise: the sheer bulk of the manuscript and its intricate revisions establish that. He meant to publish it, but then the Restoration of 1660 put his revolutionary party on ...”

“... art and commodification that Pop Art propounded. In an interview of 1977, around the time he more or less gave up his artistic career to devote himself to his two favourite recreations, smoking and reading novels, Brainard suggested it was probably the eclectic nature of his output that had saved him from developing into a brand name: I don’t have a ...”

“... understands the formalities of reintroducing characters who have been kept in storage. It’s been more than two decades since the original novel and the mental picture of its warlock and witches was colonised by the movie version, remembered most vividly for the leering satyr eyebrows and pagan gusto of Jack Nicholson as the warlock Darryl Van Horne (the ...”

“... age of two, was drugged, detached and chronically depressed; his charismatic father, James, was more or less permanently on tour with Monte Cristo, the cash cow on which he squandered his considerable talent. In 1885 James paid $2000 for sole proprietorship of the play; over the next thirty years, he performed it to packed houses some eight thousand ...”

“... its wish to co-opt such women and its wish to impose morality policing at the same time.More than two hundred people have been killed since the protests began in mid-September and the clerical authorities show no sign of relenting. Despite this, the demonstrators have reason to celebrate. On the streets and in daily life, they have defeated the ...”