“... it away. It is an idea with a long history, invoked by early liberals like Richard Overton and John Locke as a way of asserting people’s rights to freedom against governments which sought to conscript them militarily or force them to practise the state religion. The reason for its recent resurrection by libertarians of the New Right, and especially ...”

“... attempts to mollify Bloom for having cruelly depicted her in his novel Deception; the review by John Updike of Operation Shylock that drives Roth to commit himself to a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a nervous breakdown; the arsenal of psychotropics (Lithium, Halcion, Xanax, Valium, Prozac) used to calm the couple’s respective nervous systems as ...”

“... through and through, because it is our own invention, or rather the invention of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The now famous Universal Turing Machine was an imaginary device that could rearrange any row of l’s and 0’s in accordance with any finite set of rules supplied to it; the von Neumann computer is its electronic incarnation, whether as a BBC ...”

“... climate. He recalls one night when the American audience bowed their heads in silence after John Proctor’s execution: the Rosenbergs had simultaneously been executed in Sing Sing. He is both amused and appalled at the film trailer with which a Hollywood film company tries to neutralise Salesman (a cheery succession of businessmen dismissing Willy ...”

“... I thought I had best begin by expressing some old-buffer prejudices in general,’ Empson told the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961: ‘but now I will turn to English Literature, which it is my business to know about, and try to examine the fundamentals, the basic tools.’ As he turns to literature, he shelves the old-buffer prejudices and begins to display instead the rationalism which spoke habitually of the ‘basic tools’ of imagination, and the sensitivity to language which enabled him to examine and test those tools ...”

“... revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The impact of Country ...”

“... turns. At first it seems as if it is going to be a biographical account of the trickster figure of John Laroche, one of the thieves in question. Laroche is an obsessive collector, having been through passionate affairs with turtles, fossils and tropical fish before committing himself to orchids – at least for some of the time Orlean knew him. It is at a ...”

“... The Edwardians, it is well known, were great worriers. If it was not the national physique or the Teuton menace they were worrying about, it was the ‘warped vitality’ of Bank Holiday crowds, or it was bicycling. I have always been rather struck by the warning against bicycling issued by the Liberal historian R.C.K. Ensor: ‘The nervous craving of modern people for soulless and thoughtless exhilaration sufficiently explains its deplorable vogue, which will last until the stronger natures set a saner example ...”

“... Language and thought are related in at least this way: language is a means for the expression of one’s thoughts and a vehicle for their communication to others. A speaker uses the words ‘The sky is blue’ (say), he thinks that the sky is blue, intends to say that the sky is blue, and he has expressed his thought; an audience hears the words, and if he understands them and fulfils the speaker’s intention by realising that the speaker said that the sky is blue, there has been communication ...”

“... Independence, all save one or two disagreeable Presidents, together with other famous men such as John Wesley and Columbus, have been posthumously baptised, and there are vast genealogical researches by people who wish to benefit their remote ancestors. The Book of Mormon is not alone among sacred books in claiming to have originated in golden tablets sent ...”

“... by Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and sundry other eminent sex-sleuths. But there is no shaking Mr John D. Perry and his two assistants Beverly Whipple and Alice Kahn Landis. In photographs, they seem a cheery, well-adjusted trio, but there is, it must be said, something a bit dubious in Perry’s self-profile: he is ‘a psychologist (licensed in Vermont), a ...”

“... hell fire. Even descriptions of nature in America are macabre. What he remembers of a trip with John Dos Passos are the corpses of tortoises squashed on the road, and ‘the asparagus-like stench’ of a run-over skunk. On a holiday at Garnet Lake near New York the food goes mysteriously bad, bloated horseflies and red ants share the bedroom, and the ...”

“... or more mass meetings. I estimate that I have spoken in more public halls than either Gladstone or John Bright did, if only because some of the halls were not built in their day. After about two years I ran out of cities or great towns to visit, and I also ran out of steam as to what to say. I was delighted at the prospect of celebrating the beginning of my ...”

“... to do at an Anglican service: MacDonald was much at sea and missed some of his cues. Then came John Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw, presumably the literary kings of the time. Galsworthy behaved impeccably, doing everything absolutely right. Shaw got enjoyment by looking around most of the time. The next pair were Edmund Gosse and J.M. Barrie. Barrie had ...”

“... fantasy of Joyce in Ulysses than with the free-wheeling American ‘put-on’, the extravagance of John Barth. But, as against repression and silencing, the book bubbles with talk and streams with consciousness – artfully enacting its theme. Two novels about witchcraft carry credentials. The Girl Green as Elderflower is based on medieval sources, which are ...”