“... body to body, remains consistent. ‘It was not sex,’ but neither (to pick up an echo from John Donne) was it a mixing of souls. In ‘The Missing’, Gunn writes of his friends as ‘an involved increasing family’ (another family) of gay lovers: Contact of friend led to another friend, Supple entwinement through the living mass Which for all that I ...”

“... mechanism of a phenomenon is very different from being able to mitigate its impact. The physicist John Tyndall identified the greenhouse effect in 1860, but generations of scientists have failed to instigate reforms that might slow it down. Perhaps it would be better to focus not on explaining the science, but on exposing the political and industrial ...”

“... the Vleeshuis, sitting on fine Spanish leather chairs embossed with the figure of their patron, St John, accompanied by his flock of sheep and oxen; in the evenings, they retired to estates built on acres of quiet pasture just outside the city, with names like De Ribbe (the Rib) or De Ijseren Verckens (the Iron Pigs), Dlammeken (the Little Lamb) or ’t ...”

“... poverty and racism here and now, not wait for the collapse of the global capitalist order.’ John Caputo argued along these lines in After the Death of God (2007): I would be perfectly happy if the far-left politicians in the United States were able to reform the system by providing universal healthcare, effectively redistributing wealth more equitably ...”

“... The Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who carried the instrument with him on his travels, took a reading of 46 during his ascent of Mount Chimborazo in the Andes in 1802. The diagram of Mount Chimborazo from Humboldt’s ‘Geography of Plants’ (1807). Humboldt was born in 1769. His scientific activities would be impossible to confine within ...”

“... hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered to liberate the National Liberal Club from its debts, hoping that he would in return be ...”

“... Kungsholm, pride of neutral Sweden, was sold in mid-war to America, converted to trooping as the John Ericsson, then sold back after the war to her original owners. In a burst of postwar activity, before the jet age took over, the Americans made the running on the Atlantic. In 1952 the United States, ‘long believed ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting point might be John Aubrey, but perhaps it would be better to begin with Anthony Powell, the standard biographer of the first great English biographer. In his introduction to Aubrey’s Brief lives, Powell points out a significant difference between his approach to biographical ...”

“... collective movements clean when they performed at the Barbican last month.* Whereas in the work of John Cage, whose music often accompanied Cunningham’s dances, randomness seemed a rediscovery of the sounds found in ‘nature’, most notably in the sounds of the quiet concert hall with which he filled 4l33ll, there was nothing natural about Cunningham’s ...”

“... the start a vehicle for philosophical inquiry. It also reveals how much Kuhn relied on what he took to be his exceptional talent for getting inside the heads of past scientists, to see their projects and their worlds in their terms. Steve Fuller’s book about Kuhn is somewhat odd, in content, style and tone. There is surprisingly little engagement with ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... Davie’s mind as having an ‘experimental’ relationship with its contents, which Davie took to mean that he didn’t know how to think straight – and Donoghue does get Davie curiously wrong when he classes Thomas Hardy and British Poetry with Larkin’s Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse as arguing that ‘the Modernism of Eliot and Pound ...”

“... concepts of common sense together into a revolutionary package. From the Aberdeen ministers Paine took the idea that human nature itself led to belief in certain principles, and that the insights of ordinary people had more to recommend them than the lucubrations of over-educated philosophers. But he also insisted that ordinary people needed to be shaken out ...”

“... They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping.’ John Lossing Buck determined that 79 per cent of the Chinese labour force were farmers, with an average family farm of 2.62 acres. (In the United States, 40 acres had always been seen as the minimum for subsistence farming, as in ‘40 acres and a mule’.) This ...”