“... Milton, poetic creativity is hallucination; Milton ushers in the age of delirium. What Teskey means by this opposition is best explained by recourse to the etymology of delirium. Delirus (‘crazy’) is a ploughing metaphor: a lira in Latin is the edge of earth thrown up by the plough that shows where to plough the next furrow; to be delirious is to ...”

“... days later, he relayed his grave misgivings about American policy to the US ambassador to London, David Bruce. If America continued in its escalation of the conflict, he warned, it could cause the biggest rupture in Anglo-American relations since the Suez crisis. But this threat was never carried through, and Wilson would continue to provide Lyndon Johnson ...”

“... adhere to the mandates of identity politics or the constrictions of literary genre. Writing with David Foster Wallace-level verbal firepower, he was prepared to subvert the simplistic clichés attached to blackness – and the impulse towards sentimentality that goes along with them. At the height of black rapture over Obama’s election, Whitehead published ...”

“... the Platonic formula: ‘To know something is …’ Is knowledge true belief acquired by reliable means? Is it truth that one can justify to oneself? Is it something else altogether? There is nothing radically new in such philosophers’ methodology. They still test their answers against hypothetical cases. When Plato asks, in the Republic, whether justice is ...”

“... chaplain, no less); John Hull the piper with Alison, a blood relative of his former wife; David Webbe with Eve Elvell. Most of them were reported to be ‘outside’ the parish; that is, beyond the reach of the bishop’s crozier. But one more thing, reverend father: ‘John, chaplain, as it seems to them, is not firm in his faith, because he has ...”

“... Dubai have all become safe havens for yachts designated by the US as ‘blocked property’. This means that they can’t use US-owned maintenance businesses, employ US crews or conduct their business in dollars.Impounding superyachts has caused the US some headaches. In February, Reuters reported that the Amadea, a seized yacht allegedly belonging to ...”

“... also do much routine plumbing and maintenance work, the unpredictability and suddenness of illness means that their role as mechanics cannot be separated from their priestly function. The scope of the former role has grown through technological advance, while the need for doctors to exercise a priestly function has expanded as our hopes decline for an ultimate ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... the lexicographer and informed by the general linguist, whose global concerns are represented by David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. ‘My purpose in writing this book,’ says Professor Crystal in his preface, ‘is to celebrate the existence of human language, and to provide a tribute to those who engage in its study.’ This purpose ...”

“... the prehistory of the type of institution, or rather types of institution, which it embodies. This means looking back, not a hundred years but two hundred, and not to London or New York so much as to Paris. That city, long the chief supplier in Europe of luxury crafts, and the centre of modern fashion, was enabled by Napoleon’s conquests to appropriate much ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... misunderstood him, applied a name from the romantic heritage – Einfühlung, by which he means ‘the intellectual love for the objects of experience’. To the extent that it entails a capacity to be engrossed, taken out of yourself in contemplation and at one with the objects of that contemplation, this last quality, or faculty, of mind might be ...”

“... And quite right too, of course, in one sense, but the implication may be that he is extreme about means as well as ends: totalitarian. This does not follow. To be precise, Michael Foot’s love of Parliament and of Parliamentary procedures is as deep as his radicalism. The vast majority of the Labour movement share this point of view. If there are now many ...”

“... Lwoff wrote: ‘L’art du chercheur c’est d’abord de se trouver un bon patron.’ To me, this means one who suggests good ideas, helps his students along without spoon-feeding or domineering, gives them public recognition for their work and later helps them to become established as independent scientists. How do you find one? The best way is to ask the ...”

“... reconstructs sexual norms from the actions – and the fates – of a few hundred deviants, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch base their generalisations about the Tuscans and their families on one magnificent document, the Florentine property tax of 1427, which was based on a house-to-house survey of about a quarter of a million people. A typical ...”