“... a pre-modern, pre-capitalistic, magical cosmology, into a modern, capitalistic, scientific one. Weber’s ‘Disenchantment of the World’ had occurred. We are seeing in attitudes to nature an extension of the themes so brilliantly worked out in Thomas’s earlier work on Religion and the Decline of Magic. In 1500 we are in the anthropocentric world of the ...”

“... psychologically in the First World War, who was a near contemporary of Schmitt and Jünger; and William Kentridge, a white South African shaped by anti-apartheid struggles, and Koerner’s near contemporary. The Bosch chapter, which takes up half the book, comes first; the comparatively brief Beckmann essay serves as a bridge between Bosch, a scholarly ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... a distinction between the ‘mythic and moral symbolism’ of blood, on the one hand, and what Max Weber might have called ‘disenchanted blood’, on the other. Some of the time Starr seems to think that the more disenchanted blood is, the more it is purged of its cultural baggage, the better. To take one example, ‘mythic and moral symbolism’ clouded ...”

“... tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to ...”

“... any semblance of Anglican orthodoxy, agreed with the Reverend Charles Kingsley and the Reverend William Whewell, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, that it was just as ‘noble’ a conception of God that he worked through divinely instituted natural laws as that he used his powers directly to create each species. Four years after the Origin ...”