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“... road to riches but struggled up the path of knowledge; and it is the features of that path which best explain the development of their thought. It is reasonable to believe that when a philosopher or a scientist introduced a concept or proposed a thesis or advanced an argument, then he did so, generally speaking, not in order to keep up with the Platos or to ...”

“... to insert a section devoted to the Bering Straits. In the dozen or so years since the death of Geoffrey Elton, the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s prime minister and plenipotentiary, has been similarly airbrushed out of history. Elton, as anyone who did the Tudors for A Levels or read history at Cambridge between 1950 and 1980 knows, made ...”

“... century, the Admiralty was Britain’s highest-spending government department. It helped too, as Geoffrey Holmes noted long ago, that something approaching a non-partisan civil service emerged in this period. Even the parliamentary and republican regimes of the 1640s and 1650s left the lower ranks of the navy’s administration relatively unpurged. After ...”

“... to locate new land. In The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific (1992), Geoffrey Irwin suggests that their discovery of Easter Island more than a thousand years ago was a virtual inevitability, as they had developed a sophisticated search strategy which involved subdividing the ocean into precise quadrants and widening their search ...”

“... his local superior with his lackadaisical ways and tendency to drown his sorrows. Even on his best behaviour, Meadows seems to have a gift for bringing out the awkwardness in any social situation: Mrs Mackellar, his dour landlord’s dourer wife, reads his tea-leaves and predicts dire peril for those close to him; visiting him at his cottage, Gill manages ...”

“... those works which become an old favourite while still brand new. And finally, America adored him. Geoffrey Grigson, an early supporter and subsequently an astringent critic, thought Thomas appealed especially to ‘persons of a kind needing shots of the notion of art as others need shots of insulin, of a kind put on heat by the slightest contact with artists ...”

“... now writes, not the author, in Heidegger’s famous phrasing.’ He believes that because Geoffrey Hartman ‘has argued provocatively that criticism today is at least as creative as contemporary literature,’ the notion has become a fact of the culture: ‘Criticism almost single-handedly, the writers seemingly having nothing to say in the ...”

“... bed. They also had before them the example of Martin, the eldest, in whom Edward had seen his best hopes answered. Unlike his younger siblings, Martin had managed to accommodate the waterfall, responding wholeheartedly to his father’s piety and excelling in his academic work: ‘he is a dear good most loving hardworking boy,’ Edward recorded in ...”

“... in Rafah). Israel’s supporters might argue that this is not the Shoah, but the belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time.In Israel, this belief amounts to an article of ...”

“... with bankruptcy. He quits Parliament and vows, to some incredulity, that he will fashion a best-selling novel from his experience. This and later books sell amazingly well. Pluckily, he writes his way out of debt. He becomes ‘the world’s greatest story-teller’, an entertaining interviewee, a value-for-money guest on ...”

“... and Derrida criticise. Nowadays both men look like eccentrics, an impression they do their best to encourage. Their writings are filled with explanations of how very marginal, how very different and unlike all other philosophers they are. But in time they will be seen as central to the philosophical tradition, as having overcome certain ways of ...”

“... No policy-maker or analyst can, of course, avoid starting from certain assumptions. The best course, Mr Laqueur implies, is to try to follow a middle way between the ‘Pollyanna’ (wishful thinking) and ‘Cassandra’ (expecting the worst) syndromes. ‘Pollyanna’ holds the key to some of the classic examples of intelligence surprise. In 1941 ...”

“... in Norris’s treatment of authors like Frege, Quine and Davidson. They will certainly remain (at best) unmoved by his confident view that ‘Derrida shows – in exemplary close-reading style – how Aristotle’s entire metaphysics rests on a notion of momentary consciousness which his text simultaneously works to undo.’ But this statement need not be ...”

“... that the working class ‘ought’ to fulfil a given historical role is not celebratory but, at best, apologetic. This version focuses on the failure of the working class to act as the executors of Marx’s prophecy by blowing the foundations sky high. Here the concept of the labour aristocracy has often been invoked to explain the differentiation of a ...”

“... him up to a respectable £593,000 a year. The chairman of Bass’s remuneration committee was Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy, chairman of Kingfisher, whose own remuneration committee decided he was worth an equivalent rise, bringing him to £ 1.3m a year. Kingfisher’s committee was chaired by Sir Nigel Mobbs of Slough Estates, whose own remuneration committee decided ...”