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“... this claim. No academic institution should be dismissed that gave rise, as Cambridge did, to Sir Isaac Newton. But Newton’s legacy proved an ambiguous one. It encouraged in Cambridge an obsessive concentration on mathematics which, together with its exclusion of Dissenters, increasingly divorced the university from ...”

“... long afterlife of this passage to a now obscure subgenre of 18th-century verse, poems in praise of Newton. James Thomson’s ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’, published on Newton’s death in 1727, describes him as taking flight in Lucretian terms:He, first of men, with awful ...”

“... A few belong to both categories; those in the second include Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo; others, however, are nonentities. The temptation to dismiss the list out of hand is, as the authors agree, almost irresistible. They have, however, succeeded in establishing to their satisfaction that, apart from the common ...”

“... Hamilton salvaged some pride from remembering that the ‘world’s greatest-ever scientist’, Isaac Newton, occasionally found himself addressing ‘ye bare walls’ of a deserted lecture theatre. In spite of Hamilton’s failings as a self-publicist, his work eventually received the recognition it deserved. The catalyst was the publication in 1975 ...”

“... predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an intellectual bully or a bore, and one thing it’s useful to know is when not to tell everyone that you know everything. It’s no ...”

“... inch was 1/25th of a ‘sacred cubit’, a supposed ancient unit of measurement invented by Isaac Newton). Smyth’s pyramid inch fell short, but Petrie liked the life that fieldwork offered. He played up to its hardships through his long career, to the torment of younger men who trained with him: Howard Carter had to build his own brick living ...”

“... defeat or neglect. The artistic figures he reveres are mostly the fallen – Swift, Blake, Clare, Isaac Rosenberg, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Robert Desnos, Charles Péguy, Paul Celan, as well as people who are defined by their outsiderness, such as the young Berkeley and the mathematician Alan Turing – whose integrity is interwoven with their ruin. The ...”

“... At​ 1 p.m. on 13 July 1936, bidding opened at Sotheby’s on a trunk of Isaac Newton’s notebooks and papers. They had been in the family of the earl of Portsmouth for many years: a previous earl had lent them to the University of Cambridge, where scholars judged them of little scientific importance. Partly because of this indifference, the auction was overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast ...”

“... biographical sketches of three participants in Britain’s 18th-century slave economy. John Newton (1725-1807) was a slave captain who became an Anglican cleric and, towards the end of his life, an opponent of the trade. Thomas Thistlewood (1721-86) was an overseer and eventually a slaveholder in western Jamaica who compiled a meticulous diary of his ...”

“... my not skyrocketing off the face of the earth right now constitutes a sign of my submission to Isaac Newton. And, when Kesey describes McMurphy as an ‘almost two-dimensional’, Shane-like character, who ‘gains dimension from being viewed through the lens of Chief Bromden’s Indian consciousness’, I don’t think he is staging ‘an imaginary ...”

“... is no evidence of genital activity) but they were homosocial and homoerotic by any definition.’ Newton is enlisted into the gay fraternity, partly on the fictional evidence of John Barth’s Sot Weed Factor; Gray is ‘clearly homosexual’; Akenside is ‘exclusively homosexual’; and Handel is declared ‘more homosocial than the norm for the age’. As ...”

“... to America. I kept hoping, ev’ry Birthday, this would be the year.’ The boy’s name is Doctor Isaac, after Newton. ‘The Fish jump into your Arms,’ he continues a little later. ‘The Indians know Magick.’‘We’ll go there. We’ll live there,’ butts in his younger brother.‘We’ll fish there,’ Doc says, in ...”

“... sail with the tide, or people gather to witness a total eclipse of the Sun, they are trusting in Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. For more than three hundred years his theory has proved so accurate in describing the universe that it has enabled us not only to predict tides and eclipses, but even to send spaceships to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. One ...”

“... Greek, not Egyptian, and in the Christian era, not under the ancient dynasties of the pharaohs, as Isaac Casaubon, the Huguenot Hellenist, had demonstrated with depressing finality much earlier, in 1614. Kircher was oblivious: he never realised that genuine obelisks had stood at royal tombs, or that their inscriptions commemorated rulers. Instead, he read the ...”

“... to write in Latin. Some of the most radical prophets of modernity – Descartes, Grotius and Newton – felt that they could address the deepest questions about nature and nature’s laws, Scripture and tradition, more proficiently in Latin than in their native languages. Into the 18th century, diplomats continued to study Latin, and often used it in ...”