“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Early Modern England 1570-1625 (2007), it moved the question from one of civil obedience to a matter of conscience. Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr makes a lengthy, learned defence of the Jacobean government position, arguing that ‘those which are of the Roman religion in this kingdom, may and ought to take the Oath of Allegiance.’ Dying for the faith is one ...”

“... Christian religion; Milton is the most obvious example (Milton’s God, 1961), but the very devout Herbert is another. Donne he had early taken as his model, regarding him, he says, with awe and love, and trying to write poems like his. That Donne became a famous parson was not too grave a problem, since he took orders against his will, because no other way of ...”

“... terms. Theirs was a different conception of the minister’s role from that envisaged for George Herbert’s Country Parson, ‘reconciling neighbours that are at variance’, and charitably indulging, in the hope of correcting, the spiritual failings of weaker brethren. Yet Herbert was more stern, perhaps more Puritanical ...”

“... horror and shame in all who know of it. Yet, if you believe in a soul, why should the husk matter? And conversely, if you believe that there is nothing more, then the corpse is not a person either, let alone that person. But every instinct, every human feeling in the cultural world Laqueur writes about goes against Diogenes.Since Derek Parfit’s ...”

“... never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close friend. ‘Which hand am I, Mr President?’ Morgenthau asked. ‘My right hand,’ he replied, ‘but I keep my left hand ...”

“... Born and brought up in New York, she had first attended Brandeis University, and it was because Herbert Marcuse left Brandeis to become a Professor at UC. San Diego that Acker left to follow him out west to Southern California. Then, in San Diego, she not only continued her academic relationship with Marcuse: she also encountered Conceptual Art. In ...”

“... woman universally admired, a diamond geezer, should prove capable of creating such an unmitigated herbert. Dalgleish peaked early in a landscape James caught as well as any mainstream novelist: Ely, the Suffolk coast, bleakness everywhere. Empty churches, disappointed lives. Modest Sapphic alliances, inactive adulterers, and, representing hope, some feisty ...”