“... Delirium, senility, foolishness, idiosyncratic thinking: Aubrey Lewis has suggested that it may have been used in these ways as well. From the Ancients right through to the Enlightenment, paranoia has an undiscovered history. For reasons that can only be guessed at, it does not seem to have been a commonly used word, and Lewis suggests that its ...”

“... weren’t very good on the subject of matter. Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas ...”

“... might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, Richard Serra’s video art, Maurice Blanchot’s mystery novels and a 1971 promotional disc made by Salvador Dalí for the Crédit Commercial de France. One of UbuWeb’s specialities is the B-sides and rarities overshadowed by an artist’s greatest hits. Want ...”

“... is the compression of historical time. ‘Is it really fifty years since Sergeant Pepper?’ you may ask. But the time lapse feels immaterial. The internet turns up a perpetual series of anniversaries, disparate moments from disparate epochs, and presents them all as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ the late cultural theorist ...”

“... drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that she hit upon the idea of ...”

“... were more congenial (a Japanese official actually said that). This, whatever some apologists may say, is not the same as ignorant American views of foreigners or Mrs Thatcher’s jingoistic talk about Victorian values. (These values can be shared by, say, Leon Brittan, even though his ancestors were hardly of ‘pure’ English stock.) The difference is ...”

“... trails – and they can manoeuvre with acrobatic flexibility. Some have suggested that the UFOs may be prototypes that belong to the US, citing precedents like the Roswell incident of 1947, when an object that many believed to be an alien craft crash-landed on a ranch in New Mexico: it wasn’t until the 1990s that the US government revealed that what was ...”

“... not diminish after a hundred encounters. It is the sort of piece which establishes that, while it may be open to question whether Picasso is this century’s greatest painter, he is undoubtedly its greatest sculptor. The late style surely emerges in October 1964 with works such as the two large paintings of The Artist and his Model dated 25 October and 26 ...”

“... chief delight, Drowned in teares to mourne my losse I stand the bitter night In my window, where I may see Before the windes how the cloudes flee. Lo what a mariner love hath made me! As others embrace, she looks out of the window, a mariner just in a poetic conceit. Surrey is the only early Tudor poet to explore this form of feminine pathos – waiting and ...”

“... and passes over quickly, is looked upon with greater feelings of terror than the disease which may be more fatal, but more common. The words of another Scottish MOH, Alexander MacGregor of Glasgow, illustrate why this perception was wrong for measles: ‘In 1907-08 it gave notice of its presence by appearing on the outskirts of the city in the ...”

“... only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The minister was to speak ‘with a loud voice’, so turning his body ‘as the people ...”

“... thing, although cruel leaders of lesser states, faced with the threat of prosecution for genocide, may, it is true, be deterred, they are just as likely to cling ferociously to power whatever the cost in human lives. Stimulated to think ahead, inveterate adventurers may even plot to eliminate any witnesses who might testify ...”

“... social forces and ideology. Mothers who know but fear standard canons of emotion and behaviour may see that the ways they are supposed to feel and act are not ordained by human nature. And if they don’t obey either the old rules of family, or whatever is the official psycho-paediatric rule of the day, they need not feel quite as guilty as they are ...”

“... Church of England within Christendom. Fisher was undoubtedly the victim of royal tyranny, but it may be unhelpful to describe Henry VIII as ‘the most contemptible human specimen ever to sit upon the throne of England’. Moreover it is questionable whether Fisher displayed that capacity for leadership – ‘clarity and confidence of vision, tenacity of ...”

“... dividing his time between games, the Officers’ Training Corps, walking in the countryside (Richard Jefferies was an enduring hero), and excitedly discovering writers. With Shakespeare, Blake was an early enthusiasm (everything was early in Sorley’s life); Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, he told his parents, was supposed to be the finest drama ...”