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“... Wunderjahr papers in Annalen der Physik, changing the way physicists think about space, time and matter, had their centenary in 2005. All were duly marked, mainly by historians, philosophers and physicists, but there was nothing remotely approaching Darwin 200. Even if we had an unambiguous metric for ranking scientific genius and modernity-making – one by ...”

“... quest, relates how he and his wife survived the flood. ‘Let me reveal to you a closely guarded matter, Gilgamesh, And let me tell you the secret of the gods. Shuruppak is a city that you yourself know, Situated on the bank of the Euphrates. That city was already old when the gods within it Decided that the great gods should make a flood.’ However, the ...”

“... acts; feelings are recounted in the biography – depressions, infatuations, rages – but with a matter-of-factness appropriate to their subject. When depressed, Morgan summoned doctors, went on rest cures, travelled and got better. Unfulfilled in his second marriage (his first wife died of consumption shortly after their wedding), he took on ...”

“... I thought it was a strange view for someone who had been a refugee from Nazi Germany,’ Herbert Engelhardt, who lived downstairs, said. ‘I got the impression that Kissinger suffered less anti-semitism in his youth than I did as a kid in New Jersey.’ Mr Engelhardt is one of those simple souls who tends to blame American-Jewish paradox on ...”

“... canvas recalls Jed’s college girlfriend Geneviève, who worked as an escort with cheerful matter-of-factness and whose simple profession (‘with a supplement of one hundred euros for anal sex’) never provoked any misgivings on Jed’s part. One of the ‘Business Compositions’, however, defeats even Jed’s extraordinary draughtsmanship: Damien ...”

“... usually trespass, criminal damage or a breach of the Public Order Act. Arson is a different matter. It’s hard to believe that such a serious crime could have been authorised, retrospectively or otherwise. But it’s harder still to believe that Lambert’s actions were unknown to senior officers, his handler at the very least. Lambert led two ...”

“... to one of its historical disguises, to this or that behaviour, this or that set of symptoms. As a matter of fact, the hysteria to which Mitchell refers (the Cain complex, the reaction to the identity trauma etc) is not a thing open to observation: it is a theoretical construct intended to account for a multitude of phenomena among which some have ...”

“... will starve to death if we take out from the country whatever we need.’ It was written by Herbert Backe, state secretary of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture. While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus ...”

“... other’. Ethnicity is most commonly understood as something richer and more specific than race: a matter of shared cultures, languages, traditions and beliefs. Kaufmann’s frame of reference is both too broad and too narrow. On the one hand, the cultures and histories of the countries he writes about are plainly not uniform. The US is a former settler colony ...”

“... of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of Pym’s favourite poets.) Gently mocking self-love, Pym’s novels find redemption in commonplace pleasures – though without sanctimony. ‘The trivial round, the common task,’ Belinda repeats from Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning Is the ...”

“... translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald McMillan’s transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927-38 (1975), one finds an astonishing compendium of the most interesting avant-garde ...”

“... referred to as a ‘fallback’. None of these designs would produce anything like a megaton. Dr Herbert York, then Director of the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, was a US observer of Short Granite, the first Grapple test. He told us that he made a rough estimate of its yield from the angular size of the fireball and concluded that it was less than ...”

“... theses of The Origin is that ‘it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes.’ Surviving beings, Darwin proceeded to claim, are ‘ennobled’ when viewed in the light of this ...”

“... there had been a heated debate in Encounter between Clifford Geertz and the Swiss journalist Herbert Lüthy. It took place between late 1965 and early 1966, when communists and their sympathisers were being massacred in Indonesia after the attempted coup of 1965. Lüthy had started it by writing an essay on the ‘irrationality’ of Indonesian political ...”

“... account – are the answers to big questions: can one die at peace without God, for example. The matter has been debated since the Enlightenment, reached a peak of public attention in battles between believers and free-thinkers in the 19th century, and remains alive in some circles today. There are many, many more obstacles to dying peacefully than an ...”