“... disorderly ordure. Freud was unusual in devoting some attention to the relatively feeble olfactory powers of human beings, and philosophers, as Corbin remarks, have tended to ignore the sense of smell on the grounds that it has little to do with thinking, and smell, when strong, is associated with animality. Kant excluded it from aesthetics. Yet there were ...”

“... dreadful, to be the logic of all this, and recent television performances by Nick Humphreys and Richard Dawkins confirm this. Aren’t we all tired of these reiterations of sauve qui peut or, at its worst, that we don’t have it in us to love other people’s children? I’m sure there is a vast constituency of exhaustion out there, which feels it has seen ...”

“... look any brighter when it comes to the adoption of super-rational strategies by nuclear-armed powers – the subject which engages him most urgently. It is a topic on which Hofstadter writes as a common citizen, not from de haut – a standpoint which contrasts strongly with, for instance, that of Freeman Dyson’s Weapons and Hope. The approach leaves me ...”

“... He did not give a damn about anything except zapping Communists. Nor did his chief supporter, Richard Perle, nicknamed ‘Prince of Darkness’, for his single-minded obsession with avenging his ancestors for what the Russian Reds did to them. Perle’s high moral tone reached its zenith when he recommended arms purchases from an Israeli firm which had ...”

“... their declarations, much hotter. Another of the new voices, in this collection of essays, that of Richard Scher, is raised to point out that over-ambitious manipulation and political ruthlessness by the Moderates in 1762 produced a reaction uniting, for a while, the middling and lower orders of Edinburgh. Indeed occasionally in the 1760s there can be heard a ...”

“... The camp, death, destruction become madhouse normality for him. Suffering bestows prophetic powers (the maimed seer is a recurring figure in Ballard’s fiction): in visions of terrible incandescence, Jim foresees American firebombing of Japan, the atomic destruction of Nagasaki, and – ultimately – World War Three. In clinical terms, ‘real’ war ...”

“... of the origin of visual art and of the function of its different forms, and was the inspiration of Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Like Haskell, he had the storyteller’s ability to ‘captivate’ his audience, and nothing could be more appropriate, in Haskell’s account of the life and adventures of this picaresque ...”

“... attic. The collapse of the New Deal coalition opened another door as well. Through it walked Richard Nixon. Stein examines the strategy that aimed at making the Republicans the party of the white working class. It was an audacious political move that took advantage of the racial, nationalist, religious and patriarchal resentments and fears unleashed by ...”

“... for whom the terse passion of ancient Hebrew poetry (Job and Psalms especially) had expressive powers unmatched by the regulated, decorous traditions of classical verse. Generous illustrations from the 14th-century poet Hāfiz decorated the work that made Jones’s name, A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), in which he whimsically styled himself ...”

“... to evening meetings: by 1838, they could not even be kept out of the zoological section, where Richard Owen ‘modified the reproductive part’ of an address on marsupials ‘as delicately as possible’. By dissecting the chronicle of events thematically, the authors tease out the various sinews which they weave into a coherent interpretation of a ...”

“... phenomena. Even baker’s yeast, when choosing a mate, is credited with subtle discriminatory powers of a type that one would not normally expect from a fungus. The revolutionary import of the Zahavis’ view is well illustrated by their discussion of that touchstone for evolutionary biologists, the peacock’s tail. For the Zahavis, each feature of the ...”

“... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...”

“... UDF was to blame for its violence against Inkatha, Inkatha were not goodies either. The work of Richard Cobb should have made us expect all revolutions to be shot through with villainy, banality and irony. For every saintly Mandela or heroic Steve Biko there were always likely to be several murderous Harry Gwalas, fraudulent Allan Boesaks and others who ...”

“... in 1678 and became the first Englishman to make the journey to Mecca and return, long before Richard Burton’s celebrated voyage in 1853. Pitts converted to Islam, as so many in his situation did, and although he remained a slave until 1693, when he managed to escape, he seems to have been treated well and to have formed a largely favourable view of his ...”

“... Tempest sequel or commentary, The Sea and the Mirror, testify to a major poet at the height of his powers. A model of professional industry, he was also in these years writing a good deal of prose.Presumably he agreed to do this heavy lecture course for the same reason he wrote prose – because he needed the money – but they show few signs of being put ...”