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“... To worry in this way, you need to take seriously the question whether our descriptions of Reality may not be all too human, all too influenced by our hopes and fears. It helps to anguish about whether Reality (and therefore Truth as well) may not stand aloof, beyond the reach of the sentences in which we formulate our ...”

“... its outline distinct or was it so brilliant that outline could not be perceived. In other words I may say did it look like the moon definite in form or like a large bright fire at a distance quite indefinite except as a centre of light? Did it distinctly cut ducks & drakes on the surface of the lake? Were its bounds perceived & traced by the eye? Were any ...”

“... Just doing their job. There aren’t too many significant resemblances between Pynchon and Richard Powers – Powers’s imagination is deeply invested in the local and in Pynchon the local is always about to become something else – but the passage about the Line and the Good finds an interesting and no doubt unintended commentary in The Echo ...”

“... terror. I must also condemn a terror which is practised blindly on the Algiers streets and which may any day strike down my mother or my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice.’ Even so judicious a critic as Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing 13 years later, saw fit to comment: ‘The defence of his mother required support for ...”

“... son. He was happiest in the army, and perhaps the Communist Party. A structured male environment may have been his deepest need. The left-wing connection is a further facet of Hammett’s hold on our minds. Recently-opened FBI files are said to confirm that he was a CP member – although the laughable ineptitude of FBI agents and informers revealed by Ms ...”

“... a new world: it answers some questions that have hitherto been asked in vain and others which we may not have thought of asking at all. What sort of people collected paintings in the 19th century? How far did they specialise, or were their tastes catholic? What were their motives? Did they buy from artists or dealers, or did they commission works to their ...”

“... with which, as the Elizabethan prohibition implies, it was often associated. Charlatanry it may have been, but like some other pseudo-sciences it bore solid credentials from antiquity. Pythagoras and Hippocrates had endorsed it as a formal study, and Physiognomonica, the treatise that was most instrumental in conveying ancient thought on the ...”

“... here and there, much awkwardness of concept, as much juvenility as sapiency ... Hate living I may, disdain people I may, long for oblivion I may; nonetheless I find existence exciting, people stimulating, oblivion not near. If I pass on to a small section of posterity the ...”

“... and the same enthusiasm as those of earlier times. Where they are the work of scholars, they may be intellectual forays in their own right. And, as the professionals sharpen their wits upon each other’s opinions and theories concerning the countryside, the amateurs enjoy the new light that filters through to illuminate their understanding of old ...”

“... One of the aims of anthropology,’ Richard Rudgley says, ‘is to understand the self by way of the other.’ Are we to take it that if the Koryaks of Siberia had a high old time on the fly-agaric – or on the recycled urine of a fly-agaric consumer – we too should stock up on magic mushrooms? Rudgley maintains that humans have ‘a universal need for liberation from the restrictions of mundane existence, satisfied by experiencing altered states of consciousness ...”

“... of the competitiveness of his profession and of any infections of aggressive masculinity he may have picked up from reading Emerson or the ever-devious Hawthorne. His contentions are that in the North-Eastern United States before the Civil War ‘the reigning ideology of manhood oriented itself toward power, not feeling’ – such dichotomies ...”

“... made common cause. The Imperial College entomologist Harold Lefroy founded Rentokil, and may have been the first ‘research entrepreneur’ of the kind Mrs Thatcher wished all scientists to become. Sadly, on 10 October 1925, Lefroy was overcome by fumes while experimenting on a gas of his own invention, and never enjoyed the fruits of his ...”

“... groups or clandestine agents’. The alleged collusion between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi may have been an invention, but this type of collusion is widespread, from the CIA’s backing of Central American death squads to the anti-FARC paramilitaries sponsored by the Colombian state. The problem with trying to assess the epistemological status of ...”

“... Six hundred years ago this summer, Richard II lost his throne. Preoccupied by the attempt to shore up his failing Irish peace settlement, Richard unwisely delayed his return to the mainland in order to confront a rumoured uprising, and landed to find his kingdom already slipping from his grasp ...”

“... part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary political pertinence of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and even The Merry Wives ...”