“... a creation of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and like them it had almost magical powers. Antiquarians claimed they could speak to the dead; magi claimed they could call them back to life; and indexes genuinely showed the reader where to find exemplary figures doing great things, as well as what they had said and written on any given ...”

“... Marlowe, in his stale office in Downtown, snarling alternately at the punk scum and the powers-that-be, was a political time-bomb waiting to explode. In their agony and panic no less than 100,000 bedrock Republicans crossed the lines in 1934 to vote for the socialist Upton Sinclair in his gubernatorial campaign conducted under the slogan ‘End ...”

“... the people carried on by generations of time-serving buffers, unwitting agents of malign superior powers. Some subscribe to this conspiracy theory because they genuinely cannot see anything in Shakespeare and can find no other explanation for the fuss about him. Others like him better but feel they have to politicise him into conformity with their own ...”

“... 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 ...”