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“... psychology, to which he gave the name ‘functionalism’. I’ll try to explain that, but first a glance at what Putnam calls, when he soars, his ‘approach/avoidance’ relation to a family of large ideas. The thoughts which he wants to avoid, but which tug at him still, are (his list): The truth about the world is independent of what we think about ...”

“... on what has gone before. In ‘Out of the Fray’, an uneasy pre-marital visit to London ends with Ruth watching her husband-to-be asleep and thinking: ‘She understood that when he left her it would be like death and wondered when it happened how she would go on.’ In that sentence, the word ‘understood’ helps to make Mary Gordon seem to be endorsing an ...”

“... could now be heard emanating from the Kremlin. It’s true that apart from Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first president of post-Soviet Georgia, no Soviet-era dissident came close to assuming power in the manner of Lech Walesa or Václav Havel. But several of them, including Sakharov (released from internal exile), Liudmila Alekseeva (returned from exile in the ...”

“... in Biblical studies which has made their work possible: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). ‘The first chapters, comparing Old Testament narrative with Homeric narrative and meditating on the unique relation of ordinary-language realism to high “figural” meanings in the Gospels, not only offered new perspectives on the Bible but also suggested new ...”

“... is taking a beating these days. The assault began a few years ago with a blistering profile by Ruth Shalit in the New Republic. Shalit’s article, entitled ‘When We Were Philosopher Kings’, portrayed bioethicists as pompous blowhards who are widely ignored even as they insist on their own importance. One, remarking on the reception of his ethics ...”

“... Eight million horses​ perished in the First World War, along with untold numbers of donkeys and mules, just as the ascendency of the car made clear that the pervasiveness of the horse as a working animal was coming to an end. The disappearance of the horse from urban –and later rural – life didn’t happen overnight ...”

“... wish for. For the right, Thatcher’s victories in the 1980s show what can be done under a first-past-the-post system – and no doubt it was the prospect of a Thatcher-like landslide that drew May to her Waterloo. But getting out of Europe was hardly a precondition for the triumph of Thatcherism. Rather, it was getting into Europe that helped ...”

“... a factory nor an office building nor a research station but a combination of all three’. The first of many ‘flexible sheds’ that Rogers has designed over the years, the Reliance Controls Electronics Factory owed much to the elegant simplicity of the Case Study houses in Southern California, especially the famous Eames House of 1949. Yet Rogers was ...”

“... from the High Victorian age to the New Elizabethan age, which was also, according to Nead, the first neo-Victorian age. They possess a palette that is specific to them and to the gobs of phlegm they provoke, known in Partick and Govan as Glasgow Oysters (London Peculiars and London Particulars excite more genteel expectorations). The ‘characteristic ...”

“... Pound always rather prided himself on being ‘out of key with his time’, to quote from the first line of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, and in his letter to Tessimond observes that the young poet ‘must be very much out of the world to have invoked me … from oltre tomba’. Tessimond’s neglect, both in his lifetime and since, is generally put down ...”

“... On 15 December 2022, Harvard announced that Gay would become its thirtieth president, the first black person to occupy the top post in the university’s nearly 400-year history. At the end of September last year, she was inaugurated to great fanfare. A week later, on 7 October, Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1200 people and seizing 240 ...”

“... as well as with the actual 20th-century country where she mostly lived. And yet she wrote in her first language, English, and didn’t think of herself as Italian. She went to live in Fiesole, in the hills above Florence, after her father’s early death from tuberculosis in 1912, when she was seven years old; her father’s family were American, wealthy ...”

“... a respected Jewish family in Copenhagen, she had been left motherless at 15 and made a disastrous first marriage which broke up almost at once. Some years later, well after the disappearance of this first husband, she found herself pregnant, which is where the mystery of Erikson’s birth came in, the crux of his life and ...”

“... Glasgow, where the Better Together foot soldiers had gathered to watch the results. From the very first declaration – the bellwether county of Clackmannanshire – it was clear their side had won. Drinks flowed. There was a curry. There were speeches. By 6 a.m. there was dancing. As a journalist, and as a Yes supporter, I would rather have been with the ...”

“... the darkness by his art. As Rilke, another beneficiary of Wittgenstein’s largesse, was among the first to recognise, Trakl’s verse ‘encircled’ the trauma of modernity. But it was not just what Trakl said that mattered, it was how he captured the unsayable. As Rilke notes, Trakl’s longest poem, ‘Helian’, revolves around its silences: The rise and ...”