“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years of steam and filth, a pioneering American emerged ‘with a taste of sulphur on his lips, a weight upon his chest, a difficulty of breathing and . . . a firm determination to encounter ten jams on Ludgate Hill rather than make another trip on the Underground railway of London’. Like mining accidents, the intermittent catastrophes on the Underground ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... character sketches, the Essays present not a clear set of values (although they do attach great weight to mercy and friendship) but a shifting pattern of dispositional preferences extended through space (more than a thousand pages) and time (more than two decades). Montaigne’s biggest dispositional preference is for surprise, and following the drifts of ...”

“... moment of this kind in early Shakespeare (which Bushnell touches on very briefly) is the scene in Richard II in which Queen Isabel overhears her gardeners, who are at work, presumably, in a privy garden of the sort developed at Hampton Court. The gardeners turn their labour into an allegory of the present ills of the commonwealth, in which every bough is ...”

“... in New York you see the opposite: massive masonry used to encase an elaborate steel frame, giving weight to a ceremonial statement. A picture of the Pompidou Centre shows the huge cast-steel gerberettes that transfer forces from the horizontal spans via vertical rods to the foundations; an engraving of 1764 by Piranesi shows centring and stonework for Robert ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... back in England increasingly infuriated by their distinctly unvalorous and self-indulgent monarch, Richard II. King Henry IV proved a more convincing ruler than Richard, and his time on the Reysen helped excuse his murderous usurpation back home. The Teutonic Knights’ enterprise took three centuries to collapse under the ...”

“... 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 ...”