“... in terms of material substrates, it’s been asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – though Thomas Nagel’s famous essay of 1974 wasn’t really about the consciousness or sensory world of bats but about the consciousness and sensibilities of reductionist philosophers. (Nagel’s answer: we don’t know, and we certainly aren’t on the way to knowing ...”

“... in this period – Simon Schama’s Citizens and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – which reached a mass non-professorial audience. Kennedy’s book has, in fact, had a profound influence on political thinking in the United States. But what is more striking is Darnton’s own reaction to the ‘monographism’ which he perceived as ...”

“... Scotland is anything like Ulster. And when the only known Scottish Catholic writer, the novelist Thomas Healy, finally surfaces, he, too, thinks this is a non-question. It’s the first time he’s ever been asked about his religion, he remarks. But as anyone knows who knows Glasgow, this is mostly the burial of consciousness. Scotland can be as impenitently ...”

“... of the literature of contemporary social analysis ranging from that composed by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Dineley in the 17th century through that written by Charles O’Conor and Sir Jonah Barrington in the 18th, and forward to that executed by Conrad Arensberg and Rosemary Harris in the present century. Due acknowledgement is made by Dr Foster whenever he ...”

“... were detected by oracles, diviners and ‘witch-doctors’, whose diagnostic and therapeutic powers as dispensers of anti-witchcraft magic Zande ascribed to their intimate knowledge of witchcraft. The ‘witch’ so discovered was typically a personal rival and enemy, witchcraft being synonymous with jealousy, envy, spite and hatred. The person whom the ...”

“... in World War Two, a lengthy and somewhat mawkish critical assessment of the American radical poet Thomas McGrath (whose work ‘will be remembered in one hundred years when many more fashionable voices have been forgotten’), another, better tribute to C. Wright Mills, snatches of Thompson’s own, unimpressive poetry, and, apparently, virtually everything ...”

“... overwhelmingly those of a particular constituency, the metropolitan bourgeoisie. Thus, as Peter Thomas shows, the prints of the American crisis express many views – e.g. hostility to the Stamp Act – which are clearly those of London’s mercantile communities, but which it would be question-begging to attribute to the political nation at large. The same ...”

“... from idealistic internationalism into chauvinistic imperialism. The hostility of the other great powers, culminating in the Second Coalition in 1798, made survival the sole priority. Members of the United Irish embassy to France ran the risk – to which, as Dunne shows, Tone succumbed – of internalising French priorities. French doctrine predisposed the ...”

“... as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s assistant, and soon the healing powers return. The family firm prospers until Timothy, whose low-key sexual awakening is beginning to make him curious about the world, decides to leave home again, and to finance his further education (he wants to study English literature) by working nights in a ...”

“... It is a great strength of Lennard’s book that he does not allow any one of those four powers, ‘practice, art, method or system’, to lord it over the others; his argument depends on his keeping all four in play, referring to all, deferring to none, and leaving it to them to settle their differences. It is an allied strength that he takes so ...”

“... point in a little-noticed passage in an essay called ‘Whether genius is conscious of its powers’, where he argues that ‘the stimulus of writing is like the stimulus of intoxication’: ‘While we are engaged in any work, we are thinking of the subject, and cannot stop to admire ourselves; and when it is done, we look at it with comparative ...”

“... It is an indication of her independence of mind that among the influences she admitted we find Thomas Hardy, whose poetry, on the face of it, belonged to another age: she took what she wanted wherever it came from. Yet she very well understood the modern American virtues of Williams, Stevens, Cummings, Eliot, Pound, Kenneth Burke and Yvor Winters; and, in ...”

“... Politicians and intellectuals – especially on the right – appear to regard Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and John Adams as the American equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Cato and Brutus, while the wider culture acknowledges the near-superhuman qualities of the men of 1776. The founders in their periwigs, breeches and ...”

“... variation.’ Segal spent three years first as a postdoctoral fellow under the study’s director, Thomas Bouchard, and then as the assistant director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins ...”

“... the infinite merge in the act of imaginative creation. To surrender oneself to dark, unknowable powers is to become all the more uniquely oneself. One must lose one’s life in order to find it. For one strain of Modernism, by contrast, the self is displaced by the very forces which constitute it – unhoused, scooped out, decentred and dispossessed. We are ...”