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“... with a series of writings which have demonstrated, among much else, how the landscape can be ‘read’, while hammering home the fact that most of it remained unchanged for much longer than has generally been supposed. Later on, a cluster of young historical ecologists based at Monks Wood Experimental Station, outside Huntingdon, deepened and widened some ...”

“... Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935 ...”

“... was his rejection of the name his parents had given him: from his teens he called himself Richard. A sparkling-eyed poet who played rugby at school, he caught the eye of many women. In his youth he had a taste for velvet jackets and bow ties; he had studied some Greek, and relished the Romantic Hellenism of Keats’s Endymion, whose famous first line ...”

“... The last few years​  have been rich in Oxford Books, and I have read three of them: 18th-Century Verse and 18th-Century Women Poets, both edited with great skill and erudition by Roger Lonsdale, and Travel Verse, by Kevin Crossley-Holland. When I say ‘read them’ I mean I have dipped copiously, as one usually does with anthologies, sometimes taking years to digest the whole ...”

“... Love is an emotion of the heart, but not one of the palate.’ Whoever s/he was can’t have read Fielding, In Tom Jones (1749), ‘what is commonly called love’ is defined as ‘the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh’. Not all of the ‘gems’ concern table manners; that’s just one of ...”

“... in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard Godfrey suggests in the catalogue that he failed because he could never avoid exaggerating, if only a little). He possessed a combination of technical abilities which no modern caricaturist can match: a good grasp of anatomy, a fine way with drawn drapery ...”

“... have never been established, despite extensive investigations by the staff of the Sunday Times. Richard Johns, Middle East editor of the Financial Times, who wrote most of the rest of the book, says in his introduction that he believes Holden ‘aroused, unjustifiably, the suspicion of some persons in the paranoid world of intelligence and subterfuge of ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual ...”

“... These palaces were essentially status symbols. Italy was becoming a land of façades. Professor Richard Trexler, another old Florentine hand, is interested in another kind of façade. His long-awaited book is a study of ritual and formal behaviour in Florence from the 14th century to the end of the last Republic in 1530. Historical studies of ritual have ...”

“... to know why the inhabitants of a dying town could only discuss their problems in a cloud of smoke. Richard Klein, Professor of French at Cornell, could supply Mrs Willis with a number of answers, one of them being that, in wartime, smoking keeps up ‘courage and endurance in the face of intolerably stressful circumstances’, not only because of its ...”

“... via the (mild) heresies of Hicks, James Meade and Roy Harrod rather than via the true belief of Richard Kahn or Joan Robinson. In any event, Keynes made no further important theoretical contribution to economics. The running was left to others. For Skidelsky, however, this is an unreal problem since the third volume is dominated by what he sees as the ...”

“... in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader,’ read the report of the Korean Central News Agency. ‘The accused is a traitor to the nation for all ages who perpetrated anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts in a bid to overthrow the leadership of our party and state and the socialist ...”

“... or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of writing’, also believes, according to Norris, that ‘literary critics had best give up the idea that philosophy (or “theory”) is capable of solving any problems created by their own ...”

“... a place in some literary equivalent of Wisden (‘the largest number of multi-volume histories read by a Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy ...”