“... Borrower’: this may refer to some real-life dwarf to whom the name was attached, like the famous Charles Stratton, ‘General Tom Thumb’, for the Tom Thumb of early ballad or folk-tradition was sometimes literally ‘but an inch in height’. It’s essential for little people not to be ‘real-life’, though fully ‘human’ within their alternative ...”

“... occasional cause of the foundation of the BAAS was a letter from David Brewster, in Edinburgh, to Charles Babbage, in London, suggesting this new initiative in their campaign to halt the ‘decline of science’ in Britain. The efficient cause of success was the Reverend William Venables Vernon Harcourt, founder of the York Philosophical Society, who became ...”

“... Heaven.’ For Terry Eagleton, Clarissa is a martyr in a cause she could not know, her Christian hope really a proleptic figure for the consolations of feminism: ‘If for Richardson and his heroine that absent dimension has the name of God, we ourselves, reading the novel after the advent of the women’s movement, may perhaps give a more precise name to ...”

“... quarrel with some of Rorty’s central contentions, my admiration for his book is tempered by my hope that readers will not too easily be seduced by it. What is it of which Rorty seeks to convince us? Primarily, that since the 17th century, philosophy has been dominated by a master image, the image of the human mind as a great mirror in which the facts of ...”

“... a standpoint which contrasts strongly with, for instance, that of Freeman Dyson’s Weapons and Hope. The approach leaves me moved, and yet unsatisfied. For Hofstadter is not a common citizen, but one with access to fortresses and showpieces of American technology such as MIT and Stanford – shrines of the can-do, must-win ideology. There is so much to be ...”

“... in 1789, in which the victim’s mother was clearly implicated; William Gull’s and Charles Lasegue’s independent recognition of anorexia as a clinical entity in the 1870s, and their delineation of it as a psychological disorder as well as a physiological one. Then, its aetiology refined by Charcot and Janet between 1890 and the First World ...”

“... to Frederick Karl’s ‘Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation’ with a mild surge of hope: at least he seemed to have a thesis. But all I found there was a laboured exposition of the academic party line: that the works of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes and other ‘experimental’ writers constitute our authentic ...”

“... of ‘Funeral Music’, we are the future that flashes back on the victims and we know that their hope of reconciliation is false; Mercian Hymns gives us an archaeologist’s vision of the industrial recent past. Hill has referred to Emerson’s notion of language as ‘fossil poetry’: a historical dictionary is the record of the linguistic fissures caused ...”

“... drama of reality had its limits. Lady Jane and the rest of England, ably assisted by an enraged Charles Dickens, were having none of the suggestion that the party might have been nibbling on itself in the throes of starvation. It implied that in extremis Englishmen might lose the very treasure they took with them to plant in the wilderness: their moral ...”

“... Bless You ... Your Husband Rots In Hell’), the Duchess of York (‘Fergie Foals Again ... I Only Hope That Both Mother And Baby Die In Childbirth’), horoscopes, Vinny ‘Nutsgrabber’ Jones. Even the infamous ‘GOTCHA!’ is dusted down to celebrate the sinking of the poll tax flagship. However subversive their aims, however extreme their sentiments, the ...”

“... by 1854.’ It was generally believed that the Ottoman Empire was effete and doomed and could hope to survive only if it was reformed from top to bottom. As early as 1833, Tsar Nicholas I diagnosed Turkey to Metternich as ‘the sick man’ (he doesn’t seem to have added ‘of Europe’). And the idea of stirring the Muslims into action on behalf of ...”

“... Most of the refugees gathered in the Jungle, a ten-minute drive from the bronze statue of Charles de Gaulle and his wife on the place d’Armes in the centre of Calais, have fled countries where in recent years the French and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from regimes armed by France and the UK. Afghans ...”

“... meeting of two scandalous public figures able to relax in company where neither has anything to hope for or fear from the other. Harriette wonders why he should have minded his bad notice in the Edinburgh Review: it was not as if he was a ‘stupid, prosing poet’ who might ‘feel his inferiority’. ‘And where did you ever see a stupid, prosing ...”

“... has been named after Ibn Battutah, two films about his travels are in production, and in 1994 Charles Beckingham published the final volume of the Rihlah’s full English translation, a project begun by Gibb 65 years earlier; I hope Mackintosh-Smith’s book encourages people to read ...”

“... his punch-card loom in 1804, which, thirty more years down the road of modernisation, inspired Charles Babbage in his Analytical Engine, the great predecessor of the contemporary computer. For the dying man, the player piano is a lost term between these last two machines, the vanishing mediator between industrial and digital ages: ‘the beginning of ...”