“... years I have known myself to be on the right path.’ But there is a nagging sense that the Nazis may not have fully appreciated the importance of his thinking. Stuck in the positivistic biologism of the 19th century, they have not grasped that ‘for the last 15 years this change of the whole of being has been prepared, a change in which the movement must ...”

“... open a door between truth and fantasy, suggesting that the boundaries between reality and illusion may not be as fixed as one would want. In Hangsaman, a novel about a college student who goes missing, it isn’t clear until late in the book that Natalie Waite’s best friend ‘Tony’ is imaginary. The two complain about dorm life and talk about their joy in ...”

“... or did it develop by stages from an original formless mass (epigenesis)? These questions may have been reformulated over the centuries, but they are still at the heart of the life sciences. The unfortunate error of timing, which made the questions harder to answer, was that biology developed as a science later than physics. Physics – above all ...”

“... their effect. Authoritarian elites, in Syria as elsewhere, are largely immune to embargoes and may even profit from them because they have the power to monopolise scarce resources. The poor and the powerless, the great majority of Syrians after nearly a decade of war, are those who suffer the full impact of sanctions. As Suha Ahmad was shocked to ...”

“... with keeping the water hot. Elder John has come, in the nick of time, to save their souls. But he may be too late.Over several days, as they travel by coach, rail and finally steamboat to New Bethany, Elder John teaches them the history and tenets of Shakerism, and wins everyone over – except for Harley, who, mindful that his dying father designated him ...”

“... casts a statistical suspicion on neighbours, friends and family.These enduring habits of thought may explain why, contrary to popular myth, it is on the whole far from easy to pursue complaints of sexual misconduct. Barriers to complaint are created not only by sexist attitudes, but also by the ways in which institutions work to protect themselves from ...”

“... joke continues to run because James is worried about the worldly obscurity his stylistic obscurity may end in, and the comic heightening of their contrasted fortunes flatters even as it caricatures her. They share the joke, but it in no way settles their differences. In 1913, worried at James’s anxieties about money, she tried to get up a $5000 birthday gift ...”

“... have remembered her own dictum that ‘the historian is concerned with the sober reality.’ It may not be true, and there is much to be said for the imaginative speculation, but facts on their own would be better than stereotypes. And there are plenty of sober facts to be collected in this area which can stir the dullest spirit. I have to confess that ...”

“... his reputation is surrounded by rumour, misinformation, disinformation. Shady and unpleasant he may have been, Nicholl says, but we owe him something – not simply because he was a great dramatist and poet, but because his death was murder, and the crime is unsolved. Nicholl is an investigator with a compelling sense of duty to the past and the people who ...”

“... must have a mother to protect him... don’t you remember the night Monty was born?’) may have helped to harden her heart, however much she really did love and need her own children. As Worthen remarks, the battery of letters from Weekley and his family and friends, as well as from her own family, may have ...”

“... attempts to celebrate his subject we see the man’s reputation sink wanly over the horizon. He may have initiated some fruitful lines of enquiry, later developed by others, but he himself seems to have been unable to pursue these lines with any surefootedness or perspicacity. You begin to understand why he wrote so little. Funny things, reputations. Steer ...”

“... place! That’s the fucking Thames dribbling down your face! But the deaths of others, while they may act as a memento mori and be the occasion for anguished, horrified, or partly erotic contemplation, cannot, however nearly experienced, be the same as one’s own. Death is common to all and unique to each. One can try to imagine one’s demise, but this is a ...”

“... It appears only fitfully in the abandoned novel ‘Mood’, which dates from 1926 but which Green may have gone on struggling with after Living. Both the fragment and Green’s rueful discussion of it in 1960 are included in Surviving. He deplores ‘Mood’s technical shortcomings and his inability to profit from the kindly advice of Edward Garnett ...”

“... as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters’, a life ‘almost strikingly deficient ... in what may be called the dramatic quality’, Herbert constructs an often lurid tale of psychosocial conflict and ‘torment’, a narrative of the domestic affections translated into the idiom of New Historicist gothic. Born Nathaniel Hathorne, the only son of a ...”

“... monarchical society into a democratic one unlike any that had ever existed’, though even this may underestimate its constitutional legacy. The United States resolved ancient political conundrums that still bedevil European and British politics, problems such as federal government, divided sovereignty, democratic rule over an extended territory and the ...”