“... at the beginning of the century. Partly, this may be explained in the words once written by Keith Thomas: ‘if magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it.’ Democratic politicians have eyes bigger than their ...”

“... of our most eminent contemporaries, seem to think that’s indeed the best that you can do. So Thomas Kuhn famously maintained that, because concepts are implicitly defined by the theories that endorse them, radically different theories are ipso facto ‘incommensurable’. There is, to that extent, no such thing as a rational choice between conflicting ...”

“... remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ...”

“... found. This latest work will enhance his reputation as a leading writer with no strings attached. Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker is actually about the making of Australia and commemorates (the blurbist’s ‘celebrates’ is not the word) the bicentenary of the founding of the English colony in January 1788. It is the kind of subject that would inspire a ...”

“... and downs to which flesh is heir. He may not have the ‘heart’ of writers aching to be loved (Thomas Wolfe howling to the heavens), but his cool eye has proved an invaluable instrument. From his precocious debut with the war novel Williwaw, in 1946, up to the present moment, his focus has been keen, individual and unwavering. A thoroughbred workhorse, he ...”

“... found it a questionable, even a ridiculous European import. Most successful American painters – Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton and Georgia O’Keeffe – were then producing Americana, adding a 20th-century image of the United States to the work of the great Hudson River School painters of the early ...”

“... summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short View of the State of ...”

“... charge was false, but in the following year the political world was rocked by the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower by agents of the wife of the king’s then leading minister, Overbury’s enemy the Earl of Somerset. The stories that came out, of the drugging of tarts and jellies and wine smuggled into the Tower, roused an intensity of interest ...”

“... Henry’s reign, surfacing for example in the warning from the mayor of London, the redoubtable Thomas fitzThomas, at St Paul’s in 1265: ‘As long as you wish to be a good king and lord to us, we will be faithful and devoted to you.’After this unpromising start – a civil war in which the barons only narrowly opted in the end for the child Henry ...”

“... of King’s (and Queen’s) Bench, which was not modest in its pretensions. ‘This court,’ Sir Thomas Fleming said, ‘is the jurisdiction of the queen herself. It is so high that in its presence other jurisdictions cease.’ It had, according to Coke in 1615, ‘the survey of all other courts’. Lord Chancellor Ellesmere sought to resist this ...”

“... In 1959, Dr Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist, received a research grant to bring together three psychotic, institutionalised patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, in order to make a two and a half year study of them. Rokeach specialised in belief systems: how it is that people develop and keep (or change) their beliefs according to their needs and the requirements of the social world they inhabit ...”

“... 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 wisp, has nevertheless over the last ...”

“... the poet-professor, inordinately pleased with his apposite quotations from Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy; the passionate youth who didn’t want to read anything at all, so that his feelings and insights would remain pure; the shy, spiritual poet who, when asked how Buddhism had informed his poetry, replied, ‘I like the silences’; the energetic and ...”

“... dozen other stalwarts to listen to them – the likes of Séamus Healy, Richard Boyd Barrett and Thomas Pringle, all now catapulted into the Dáil with a mandate to disturb the political peace. While the Fianna Fáil aristocracy were punching their cards at local meetings and stealthily ascending the party ladder, these newcomers spent their time debating ...”

“... ranks, conflict quickly emerged. In a world of kings, aristocrats and rigid social hierarchies, Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, ‘all men are created equal,’ became a rallying cry of the dispossessed. Abigail Adams’s plea to her husband, John, to ‘remember the ladies,’ her observation that women, no less than ...”