Search Results

“... these, not radical revisions of transmitted texts and world pictures, occupied the likes of Thomas Thomas and Cantrell Legge. Format and coverage conspire to make the book seem an exercise in that nostalgic obsession with the minutiae of the local past to which Cambridge dons succumb even more readily than their ...”

“... the low-key and an absence of grandeur. ‘Betjeman’s brand of evocation,’ Harries says, ‘is more about churchgoing than about the churches themselves, and tends to turn the focus on the observer as much as the object observed.’ Pevsner’s researches were more unrelenting, and if close observation reveals the ...”

“... Any pushy, worldly man or woman of letters would like to find and befriend a Thomas Warton. The great 18th-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone, certainly recognised his usefulness. Malone, single-minded in his pursuit of standards of textual scholarship that would trump preceding editors of Shakespeare, knew that his friendship with Warton was uniquely helpful ...”

“... the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party; during the war he was, according to Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, a ‘one-man opposition’ to the coalition government (Churchill called him a ‘squalid nuisance’). This didn’t dissuade Attlee from appointing him as minister of health (he also had responsibility for housing) in 1945. After resigning in ...”

“... for the wild, the wet and the non-artificial was most developed. Part of the achievement of Keith Thomas’s delightful new book is to explain these paradoxes. His central argument is that these are not real oppositions, but are linked as cause and effect. It was because of the urbanism, the industrialism and the general distancing and control of nature that ...”

“... Lewis Thomas is a physician, a scientist, a medical administrator, and a man of letters whose previous books, The Lives of a Cell (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and occasional writing for the New England Journal of Medicine have brought him a large following. The Youngest Science will meet his fans’ highest expectations ...”

“... rituals may be performed. Their interior space is frequently differentiated, with some parts more sanctified than others; access for women may be restricted and entry to the holiest areas confined to the priesthood. All these practices presuppose that divinity is immanent in the world, but in a localised way. The demarcation and protection of holy spaces ...”

“... he was killed by a falling piece of timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen’s body anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased ‘he’ because ‘I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.’ The ...”

“... because the solutions that Gates sketches out haven’t fundamentally changed in a decade or more, though they are getting cheaper and more efficient, and inching closer.Gates isn’t embarrassed about being late to the party. It was only in 2006, he writes, that he was first convinced climate change was caused by our ...”

“... to their assured place in a Protestant society and culture, but that they told the story at all. Thomas Platter, the father, was persuaded by his son to record his memoirs; Felix, the son, kept a diary in which he recorded not only his achievements but, more important, the minutiae of his life. The result is a picture of ...”

“... language were ruder and less polished than those of their Continental counterparts. The translator Thomas Hoby called for writers to translate important works in order to enrich their own language, so that ‘we alone of the worlde maye not bee styll counted barbarous in our tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in our maners’. For Hoby and his ...”

“... Boffo, the editor of the Catholic paper Avvenire, suggested that Silvio Berlusconi ought to lead a more sober private life. On 28 August, Il Giornale, which is owned by the Berlusconi family, dredged up an old harassment case against Boffo, claiming to have evidence that the victim was the wife of a man Boffo was having an affair with (it seems to be standard ...”

“... your not recognising this as James’s work, however: it has languished in peaceful obscurity for more than 140 years, only now to have its authorship revealed by Floyd Horowitz, recently retired from the English department at Hunter College, New York. The passage is the opening of a story called ‘Alone’ that appeared – anonymously – in the Newport ...”

“... checking their BlackBerries and looking at their Apple and Acer computers. You wonder, how much more multi can tasking get? Then there’s a phenomenon called ‘noting’, a form of anonymous flirting in the more popular reading rooms, Humanities I and II, or Hum One and Hum Two, as they’re called. You’re seen, then ...”

“... At Thomas Hodgkin’s memorial service, in 1982, Christopher Hill, formerly Master of Balliol, used the pulpit of the college chapel to give an address entirely free of religious reference, quite a feat in view of Hodgkin’s Quaker roots and Hill’s status as historian of the Puritan revolution. ‘God was dead all right when you wrote that speech,’ I said to Hill afterwards ...”