“... pretty systems’ that we ‘soon find ourselves obliged to destroy’. Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn could not have put it better. In fact, Kuhn begins The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by echoing Priestley and identifying Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity as an example of a new and instantly convincing ...”

“... cohesion, Ferguson was no exception. He expressed confidence in his London-based publisher William Strahan, whose ear was ‘accustomed to a better dialect than my own’. Even the Ossian controversy, which embroiled Ferguson in argument with Thomas Percy, only highlights his lack of any serious nationalist ...”

“... The member yielded not seed but, at the Circumcision, blood. The Circumcision was described by St Thomas Aquinas as ‘a remedy for original sin, which is transmitted through the act of generation’. God further condescended when consenting to enact this sacramental admission of guilt, though of course free of it himself. Steinberg again and again ...”

“... with various combinations of energy, luck, ambition, ingenuity and persistence. The arch tinkerer, Thomas Alva Edison, built himself an X-ray machine within four days of learning of Roentgen’s discovery; he made a better tube, found the best material for making screens which fluoresced when struck by X-rays (it made the non-photographic use of X-rays ...”

“... though for different reasons. His intricate manoeuvres to secure the Presidency after Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s resignation in 1935 inevitably won him many enemies. As foreign minister from 1918, his unwillingness to continue to let Czechoslovaks participate in the intervention against Soviet Russia had infuriated conservatives such as Karel ...”

“... has something in common here with The Little Girls, or The Death of the Heart, as well as with William Trevor’s The Old Boys. Naturally enough, all three distinguished novelists contrive to keep the subject clear of the standard treatment given it by afternoon plays on the BBC (‘Stephanie has come back in middle age to the town where fate once dealt ...”

“... a Victorian rendition of Victor Cousin’s commentary on Kant (a triple motion of change), Sir Thomas Nugent’s Montesquieu, a moment from William Morris’s Aeneid directly inspired by Beowulf, or a comparison ‘of the meshing of knowledge and intuition’ in six 20th-century translations of Matthew XXVI:30. Time and ...”

“... yet. On the contrary, the poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward Thomas, on the one hand, or William Carlos Williams, on the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the ...”

“... appearance) to the Canary Islands, where (Spanish) bananas are still grown. A Spanish monk, one Thomas de Berlanga, may have been responsible for the fruit’s subsequent journey to the Americas, for he planted it in San Domingo in 1516; the English, those comparative latecomers to the New World, saw its wonderful obliging nature, and took many banana ...”

“... to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past will find it here. On the other hand, anyone who has wondered whether the history of the United States can ...”

“... species had to be ordered into a book. Ritvo makes much of writers like Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Bewick and William Frederick Martyn to advance her claim that there was resistance to the ‘hegemonic juggernaut’ of Linnaean classification. But in telling this tale of brave outsider plurality v. the chilly ...”

“... the throats of any domestic animals. That left human blood. Fleeing from the Liverpool slaver Thomas, which had been taken over by her mutinous cargo, crewmen in their escape boat eventually ‘fell into the dreadful expedient of eating each other’. Lots were cast to determine the first victim and fortunately the surgeon accompanying the party had ...”

“... no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the botanist William Withering, another Lunar man, it was ‘one of the best private philosophical clubs in the kingdom’, broken up, so it was said, when Tory reaction in the wake of the French Revolution brought politics too near to its otherwise tranquil ...”

“... reviews ‘while they were poring over the latest score from Lords or the Oval’. Later, when William Walton went to see Diaghilev about the possibility of a commission, Lambert went along too and played through his own ballet Adam and Eve, which Diaghilev liked but insisted on retitling Romeo and Juliet, on the grounds that one could hardly ‘expect ...”

“... intellectuals for his father’s return turned the ambivalence Klaus had always felt towards Thomas Mann into alienation. When Klaus committed suicide in Cannes in May 1949, it was left to his sister Erika to spell out the meaning of the Suicide Club described in his unfinished novel. She told American audiences that the deaths of Virginia Woolf, Stefan ...”