“... her father as a fanatic, yelling on street corners, passing out pamphlets to people incapable of reading them. Unable to save souls, he longed for martyrdom, nearly succeeding during the Boxer Rebellion. She was ashamed of him and feared him; comfort was to be found with her Chinese amah and playmates, and she married as soon as she could. Her ...”

“... some other cities. The legislation which brought in Asbos, she explains, came out of a New Labour reading of the American ‘Communitarian’ movement that encouraged ministers to believe they could deliver good public behaviour. She describes the cowed and restrictive culture which resulted in Salford, where the least street gathering of teenagers was likely ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... was, until recently, a secondary school teacher). The nature of his writing has been described by Peter Riley, in A Poetry in Favour of the World (1997), as ‘non-persuasive’, avoiding ‘the rhetorical habits which are so dominant in Western poetry’. By this Riley seems to mean that Langley lets his experience tell its own story, without the ...”

“... Reviews of Modern Physics. There have always been two traditions in metaphysics, characterised by Peter Strawson as ‘descriptive’ and ‘revisionary’. Descriptive metaphysics seeks to uncover how we do, or more ambitiously must, conceptualise the world we find ourselves in. Revisionary metaphysics seeks, by contrast, to show that our ordinary thinking ...”

“... for they couldn’t draw on the social knowledge that tells them which authors are worth reading and which are cranks, whose results can be relied on and whose should be viewed with suspicion. They could not invoke the essentially social trust – a major focus of Shapin’s work – that allows them to be confident that what is in the bottle ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... wants us to think about. The Refusal of Time was inspired, in part, by his discussions with Peter Galison, a Harvard physicist and historian of science. Galison wrote a witty, difficult text to accompany the piece on its first outing in Kassel, but if you imagine time as a container ship of inconceivable dimensions filling up with endless ...”

“... argued that that a second resolution would be required – as had the attorney general, Sir Peter Goldsmith. Tony Blair himself had tried to secure a second resolution. But then, just as the negotiations for a second resolution – handled by Greenstock – failed, the attorney general changed his view, declaring that Resolution 1441 itself revived the ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... between Culture and System’, and argues both that ‘there is obviously no substitute for reading well’ and that ‘criticism cannot assume its province is merely the text, not even the great literary text.’ Meanwhile Edward had begun to write more directly political and polemic books: The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam ...”

“... parts to the session. First, the poet would read his or her poems aloud, and we would discuss the reading simply as a reading, without going too far into the substance of the poems: ‘Why did you pause before that particular word?’ or ‘You don’t seem to wish to emphasise the line endings – is this because you feel ...”

“... might even say that no other English critic except possibly Coleridge has had his ideas and his reading more intensely studied. The reason for all this activity isn’t merely that there are so many more aspirants looking for something interesting to investigate, though that is not wholly irrelevant. It may be true that too much has been written and ...”

“... but exhilarating game that made her work effective. To play with or against Sontag, simply by reading her essays, was to apprehend that if you felt strongly enough, if you felt intimations of grace, called yourself one of art’s elect, then she would let you in on certain secrets: whom to read, how to gaze, what else there was to learn. Those who ...”

“... stylist and, lately, something of a spirit guide for Elvis. Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum. Now, on the ...”