“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has still not been taken on board in Britain: they engage with a post-Poundian poetic tradition (Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) of a kind that gives modern American poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ...”

“... is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn of the century, divided the ‘schizosaur’ into type A, the bipedal carnivore or saurischian (‘lizard ...”

“... recently pointed out, is superb environmental literature.’ Nineteenth-century geologists such as Charles Lyell rejected Biblical accounts of creation and catastrophe in favour of slow geological evolution, but Southern California’s Mediterranean-style desert ecology, Davis argues, with its ‘episodic bursts of natural energy’, produces ‘a ...”

“... The easterly trades, blowing relentlessly throughout the year, and against which they had no hope of sailing with their makeshift rigs, lay between them and the South American coast. Pollard was for sailing to Tahiti, in the Society Islands, two thousand miles away and an easy sail of several weeks at most. But Chase and Joy voiced strong opposition to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... always linked today with the design and image of the Underground, and with his fellow Northerner, Charles Holden, the architect who restyled several of the interchanges and built new stations on the ends of the Northern and Piccadilly Lines. Together, Pick and Holden are fabled to have created a ‘classic’ Underground image and tradition: signs, a language ...”

“... calls on the answering machine. From my mother: ‘Sean! You’re a father! Hooray! Let’s hope he doesn’t have too many of our crazy genes.’ From my drawling Uncle Charles, in Houston: ‘Owen Taylor is a very masculine name. Very male.’ Then ‘Hi Sean. Or Mr Wilsey. This is Sid from the New York City ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was completely off the map.’ He sinks into the comforts of a less inscrutable world: that of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. The comic strip, read by millions of Americans, is the centre of Franzen’s childhood imaginative life: ‘Like most of the nation’s ten-year-olds, I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a ...”

“... that is associated with our region is accompanied by passivity and dependence and I see no present hope for allaying it. I have come full circle in my thinking and have reluctantly concluded that the poverty that called into being the Appalachian Regional Commission is largely genetic in origin and is largely irreducible.’ In the autumn of 1990, Caudill ...”