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“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”

“... Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome, Koestler sought to establish himself as a new Darwin, a scientific revolutionary of the atomic age. Urging him on in this foolhardy ambition, which he had neither the learning nor the originality to realise, was not only his inveterate hunger for fame and intellectual respectability, but a genuine desire to ...”

“... there, he draws attention in passing to similarities between the views of Lucretius and those of Darwin, of the Epicurean atomist and the Victorian ‘transformationist’. What was mainly wrong with atomism for Bergson was its belief that the total number of atoms of which the cosmos is made is fixed, so that all that happens over time is that the stock is ...”

“... for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on ...”

“... style at all. He did not believe in ultimate Truth, but he had no doubt that Galileo, Newton and Darwin had put together some amazing packages of words and techniques which – unlike Descartes’s concept of Mind – had served many of our purposes very well. It was scientism that Rorty deplored, not science. Another theme that tripped up readers of the ...”

“... animal development found evidence of physiology transformed by environment and thereby anticipated Darwin by fully a century. Projects for linguistic improvement testified to man’s capacity to reshape the means by which he communicated and refined his intentions. Above all, interest in spreading the gospel of betterment, not merely through schooling but also ...”

“... more gentlemanly than that. Ritualised animal contests were not known before the 20th century. If Darwin had known of it, we can be quite sure that, with his interest in animal analogies of human morality, he would have greedily transcribed it into The Descent of Man. But the several sections of that work which are concerned with the ‘law of ...”

“... links’. These were discussed in various forms by Hume, both James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, Bain, and most effectively by Hartley. As Jeffrey Gray points out, a major impact of Pavlov’s work was to bring experiments to bear on philosophical notions of mind, rather as the great physicists have, over a much longer ...”

“... in order to save money. A strange coalition came to its rescue: the horticultural entrepreneurs John Loudon and George Glenny; the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire; Radical politicians, including Joseph Hume; and Sir William Hooker and John Lindley, the foremost botanists of the age. They won in 1840, when Kew passed from ...”

“... rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded his lectures with a resigned ‘God help you all.’ When John Phillips Potter nicked his knuckle anatomising – at the dead man’s request – the circus performer the ‘Gnome Fly’, he swiftly ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Adams’s 1821 Independence Day address to the House of Representatives was delivered while he was secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe. A sceptic ...”

“... controversy provoked at home by the Indian Mutiny seven years earlier had been about Charles John Canning’s attempts as governor-general to rein back the brutality of the military reprisals. A slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, seven years before formal emancipation, had been visited with hundreds of executions, albeit after some form of trial, without ...”

“... information processing demands less and less energy as temperatures fall. Again, he says, John Barrow and Frank Tipler have argued for infinite information processing (and therefore infinite ‘subjective time’ for our appropriately odified descendants) in the final moments of a Big Crunch. Mental acrobatics could take ever tinier fractions of a ...”

“... culture of the Scottish Enlightenment which Madison acquired at Princeton from the teaching of John Witherspoon. Professor Garry Wills has now followed Adair and extended his thesis in producing an interpretation of Madison in which the Scottish influence on him has a central place. Wills’s earlier book Inventing America perhaps overstated the case for ...”