“... of 1726. This was all but ready in 1984, when Whitman died. Meanwhile, a definitive biography by Richard Westfall, publication of Newton’s correspondence and, decisively, a Cambridge edition of his mathematical papers were all completed. The new translation makes use of this scholarship. It opens with another introduction by Cohen, occupying more than a ...”

“... her alone. Take for a final example the renowned physician, collector and charitable benefactor Richard Mead. When Pilkington first approached him for assistance – she was a distant relation of the Irish branch of the Mead family and was going by the name ‘Mrs Meade’ at the time – he humiliated her, deflating her literary aspirations and dispensing ...”

“... larger Cold War game. In response to Barzani’s plea, he instructed the US ambassador in Tehran, Richard Helms, to convey his sympathies: We appreciate the deep concern which prompted … Barzani’s message to Secretary Kissinger. We can understand that the difficult decisions which the Kurdish people now face are a cause of deep anguish for them. We have ...”

“... the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the Mountain, those radical deputies who sat ...”

“... in successive Coca-Cola Christmas campaigns, and hasn’t let up since. Bears distribute their weight towards their hind legs, and the resulting slinky ungainliness is a gift to animation. Cartoon bears melt hearts by contriving to lope and shuffle at the same time.But it all began in violence; or, rather, in a disavowal of violence. It’s well known that ...”

“... Ultimately non-tenable theories, above all that of the geocentric universe, attract too great a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not have whispered after his 1632 recantation, things do in the end move: for Romans the (imaginary) Rhipaean Mountains retreat further and further as ...”

“... evolutionary pressure. It was grouped together with books by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to form the canon of ‘new atheism’. I’ve Been Thinking opens with an account of the open-heart surgery Dennett underwent following a near fatal heart attack. To reduce the risk of mini-strokes, his surgeons reversed the flow of blood to his ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... to Berlin, his admirers had every reason to believe that his precocious mind would gain weight. Yet with his travel as with his reading, the main interest resides in how little he let it alter him. He seems to have enjoyed many advantages in Berlin, not counting the love, later to prove a dubious privilege, of his landlady’s beautiful daughter. He ...”

“... opened up first by access to the moneybags of the American Far Right, and then by the growing weight of the Moonie commercial empire, led to a strategic re-siting of this divine intention. In 1970 Moon formally transferred his base to the US and henceforth the main fruits of his financial empire have been poured into Moonie activities there. Moon ...”

“... by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered ...”

“... it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an argument about the ...”

“... well known that the much more authoritative Rampersad (the author of books on Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) had been at work for several years on a definitive biography. Rampersad had signed an agreement with Fanny Ellison and her lawyers that gave him full access to the Ellison papers. Jackson had only partial access. When a young professor publishes a ...”

“... the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of ...”

“... argued that even the roi soleil did not always get his own way. Monarchs who wanted to throw their weight about remained as short of cash as ever. Even under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the greatest of mercantilists (as proponents of the new orthodoxy later came to be called), the government’s deficit went on rising. Mercantilism usually means cronyism. As soon ...”