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“... through and through, because it is our own invention, or rather the invention of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The now famous Universal Turing Machine was an imaginary device that could rearrange any row of l’s and 0’s in accordance with any finite set of rules supplied to it; the von Neumann computer is its electronic incarnation, whether as a BBC ...”

“... hands’ and background music, which aims at the same fraudulent familiarity. We think we are freely responding to something on the screen, when in fact our feelings have been dictated to us subliminally by music: by musical repetitions which, quickly, persuade us that these are our dear family and friends – whom we shall be meeting again next week at ...”

“... abroad? No monarch before and few since have been so unstarchy, and have had the ability to mix so freely with ordinary people. His early statesmanship and clemency (increasingly absent in his later years) in opposing and preventing a cruel White Terror were remarkable. His interest in science, however much that of an occasional dilettante and patron, was ...”

“... what a new woman, now the public fights are won, can be. Above all, there is the fact of divorce. Freely available, widely done, and no longer carrying any sanction or stigma, it asks what marriage is. It asks what marriage is for and what, now, can sanctify it. Actually, to begin with, long before talking films, civil rights and ready divorce, there is Old ...”

“... all talking about the same house in a backstreet in Chania. Each of them had given the painter John Craxton a lump sum to repair it, in exchange for a half share in the ownership. None of them minded the imposture, which had been going on for about twenty years, and they all remained friends with Craxton, which says something about his character. His ...”

“... advocate, before many an Australian industrial tribunal, he had long been seen as a coming man. He freely confessed to everyone who interviewed him that he saw himself as a man of destiny. That had been his mother’s opinion ever since he was born, and he could see no reason to take a different view. As the boss of the ACTU, he was consistently ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... was he, as he sometimes feared, over the hill? Still, it was a rare politician who could talk so freely of his ‘urges’, and even of his W.D.s (wet dreams), and maybe the chief triumph of the Diaries was in Clark’s presentation of his randiness as just another aspect of his lofty status, as a folie de seigneur (the ‘succulent’ young girls whose ...”

“... it that we have become more competitive, more serious? ‘Not on your life, boy,’ my colleague John Hay in the anatomy lab used to say, but he would be helpfully turning a cadaver’s hand in response to my ‘Give me some palm, Olive’ and didn’t have to say he meant quite the opposite. Is it mutual supportiveness that makes collaborative writing ...”

“... of Oklahoma, and of her adversary, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, and of his Senate sponsor, John Danforth, and of his most effective champion on the Senate Judicial Committee, the fearsomely-named and viciously forensic Arlen Spector. On 11 October, when Professor Hill began her televised allegations, this was the only part of the campus to show any ...”

“... the following year, after the second civil war. Once again, the majority who wanted to establish a freely-elected parliament with most men voting was coolly ignored, and went on being ignored until the Levellers were crushed in 1649. Eleven years after that, in 1660, the entire Revolution was overthrown, another even more ridiculous king was enthroned, and the ...”

“... but many other sorts of workmen, will put in for, and get the prize.’ (Boyle’s supporter John Wallis retaliated by openly sneering at Hobbes’s plebeian-sounding surname.) Shapin and Schaffer were quickly led to realise that much wider issues were at stake in the controversy than merely the status of experiment. ‘Testifying’ about experiments to ...”

“... reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There is John Addington Symonds’s description of Tennyson and Gladstone discussing Governor Eyre’s suppression of the 1865 uprising in Jamaica, during which Tennyson sounds like a 19th-century Mark Fuhrman (‘Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers’). Jane Austen ...”

“... plots, Lone Ranger clichés and gushing emotions to psychological acuity of the kind you find in John le Carré, whom he’s unlikely to have read. Mai Jia has no interest in the tradition of espionage literature (in a promotional video for Penguin he mentioned only James Bond and Mission Impossible). ‘I read very little,’ he explains, ‘so I have the ...”

“... often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his dogmatism, religiosity, ‘moralism’ and hostility to personal liberty). Nevertheless, prominent 19th-century figures who acknowledged a ...”