“... field notes to intricate laboratory equipment). All are bound in a skein of relations that we may as well regard as social, except that the social is no longer the proprietary realm of human beings. Crucially, the objects of study themselves must be seen as actors. ANT envisaged interactive networks, in which humans and other creatures – or ...”

“... helps us to grasp his work’s ‘private grammar’, its possible ‘intended’ meanings.What may account for its wrecking tendencies is the gap between the kind of life Rochester expected to have and the role he found himself playing at court. He spent his childhood at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where he was given a thorough Anglican education by his ...”

“... brief. ‘Here is a very concise and truthful answer: the reason I write a particular story may be because something – which I call “material”, as in “raw material” – bothers me until I “do something” about it. In these cases, “bother” is wholly positive.’ A writer as capable as Davis of conjuring a found object from the merest ...”

“... of their own courtrooms. All judges are aware that any decision deemed adverse to the government may end their careers. The scale of the social transformation being wrought by these measures exceeds even the founding convulsions of the republic. To appreciate what has happened in Turkey requires historical perspective, not least because the government is ...”

“... a reason to look up, but as a bother to be removed? What harm can I do? I peck at your trash and may help carry it off; I exemplify the proactive, practically motivated hubbub and bustle that you claim to want in the young. I am visible but not heard: distracted and nearly self- sufficient introverts, I and mine never meant any trouble. We hide our eggs; we ...”

“... Puzzle with no answer forthcoming tonight From the large cast of stars and galaxies In what may be called a prodigious Expenditure of time, money and talent. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ I said Just as her upraised eyes grew moist And she confided to me, much too loudly, ‘I have never seen anything so beautiful.’ My Turn to Confess A dog ...”

“... the room is full of objects, lamps are burning here and there, who knows what hour of the night it may be? Her hair blows slowly. Yet through the very failure of its representation, Thing In Itself might be inscribed within phenomena. She lifts a piece of paper, puts it down. Kant noted a rustling aside of sensible barriers. Her unquiet drifts in ...”

“... bees who have barbed legs to clean their antennae. Basted in oil and sweat, we think our health may be all the claws and antennae we ...”

“... of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like Powers, is burdened by history, and for whom the central theme of modern life is our own historical self-consciousness. The 20th century, for these writers, is the historical century par excellence. The ...”

“... distinguished and organised by all peoples. Children catch on to them at an early age. There may he subordinate and super-ordinate classes of, for example, animals that are distinguished locally or for scientific purposes, but basic-level groupings are found around the world. Such opinions ride well with Chomsky’s beliefs about universal human ...”

“... hampered growth, ‘national’ rivalries and feuds stimulated it; tooth-and-nail competition, it may appear, has been the price of progress. Comparison with Asia suggests that on balance Europe benefited from its self-imposed ordeals; elsewhere, both society and business enterprise were too inert to generate such struggles. There can always be too much of a ...”

“... index to The Gathering Storm (‘Baldwin, Stanley ... confesses putting party before country’) may not have survived as an objective historical judgment, but even fifty years on, Britain’s preparations for the Second World War hardly look inspiring. The next long spell of Tory government in the Fifties saw Britain’s conventional forces run down without ...”

“... of the universe, and the burden of this knowledge she did bear: ‘nor is it written that you may not grieve.’ She did because he thought she did. Yet this woman could never have existed as a serious entity – this woman who could engage, with her incompetent lover G. Phibbs, on a work to define the whole scope of human knowledge – had Graves not ...”

“... to describe and to make a case for the element of critical scholarship that Classical education may contain. Textual criticism is an important kind of critical scholarship, but it is not the only kind: one must discover what the authors actually wrote, but one must also determine the reliability of the documents and monuments surviving from the Ancient ...”

“... the grounds that he is ‘less an individual than a style, a symbol, a mythology’) may seem disastrously overblown. (Has Martin not read Moby Dick, one wonders?) Nevertheless, the critical agility on display in The Mask of the Prophet may be set against Williams’s tendency to reduce literary fantasies to ...”