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“... not unlike modern research institutes; the most famous of these were at Maragha, in present-day north-eastern Iran, which may even have housed visiting Chinese astronomers, and at Samarqand, which had an underground sextant with a forty-metre radius. Using observations made at Maragha in the 14th century, Ibn al-Shatir produced lunar and planetary ...”

“... governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ‘Christian convictions are under attack as never before … We are moving rapidly towards the criminalisation of Christianity.’ He has noted that ‘in the world I come from and choose to ...”

“... now managed by an erratic caucus of Lockhart, Cromie, Reilly and the French ambassador, Joseph Noulens, was in chaos. They had assumed that the British force at Archangel, under General Frederick Poole, would advance south to seize the junction town of Vologda. His march was supposed to be timed to support counter-revolutionary risings in towns ...”

“... by essentially compilatory works, the long lists and catalogues that culminated in the work of Joseph Eckhel, another Austrian and curator of the imperial coin cabinet in Vienna. His Doctrina numorum veterum invented some of the classificatory principles with which we still work, for instance the sequence in which Greek coinages are presented in ...”

“... Scotland. Shipyards, quays and graving docks squeezed together along the flat coastal strip to the north of the railway, while tenements, some of them spectacularly sited, lined the slopes that rose steeply to meet the Renfrewshire moorland. This was more or less the town as I first saw it. It seemed impossible that there could be a castle in such a workaday ...”

“... dark windows. Farrell’s folly seemed to be twinned with the other publishing conglomerate on the north side of the river: Random House. Marks modestly described his book as undernourished fiction, fiction buried beneath an excess of facts. It’s the first reflex of the con man, the bullshitter, to lay down a smokescreen of names, dates, addresses. Bore the ...”

“... house in Wilno, was sentenced to five years’ Siberian exile at Kirensk, a thousand kilometres north of Irkutsk. There he spent much of the time reading and listening to survivors from previous generations of Polish exiles: heroes of 1863 or socialist pioneers. When he was allowed to return to Wilno in 1892, family and friends didn’t recognise him: his ...”

“... Geller’s arm and pointed out of the bus at some distant clouds, shouting: ‘Look! There’s Joseph Stalin in the clouds! What is he doing up there?’ He had the bus stop, and ran into the desert. ‘Oh my God, Larry, follow me!’ Elvis was babbling, tears running down his face. He grabbed Geller, hugged him and said: ‘You’re right: you told me the ...”

“... distinct from documentation or devotion. That this has been a general drift across the discipline, Joseph North has argued in his recent Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History with good reason. A fortiori in the case of such an eminence as Proust. In the academy, criticism as once understood is, on the whole, at a discount. Comparison tends to ...”

“... poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s ...”

“... there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to take over the security of the country; I heard Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are 130,200 who have been trained and equipped. That’s a fact. The idea that that number’s wrong is just not ...”

“... my impression of their radicalism is that it is fairly tongue-in-check. Cases in point are John Joseph Stockdale and ‘Baron’ Renton Nicholson. Dr McCalman touches only on the latter, but he promises a sequel to Radical Underworld, to deal with the Victorian period: this, to judge by his present achievement, will be a study of quite exceptional ...”

“... many people ignored and which yet proved more powerful. Best has found a wonderful quotation from Joseph Conrad, who described the Hague Tribunal as ‘a solemnly official recognition of the Earth as a House of Strife’. Conrad continued: ‘War has made peace altogether in its own image; a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of peace ... eloquent with ...”

“... class of Edinburgh and Glasgow was much less worried about having a British base. Moreover, North Sea oil, though never quite the vote-winner the SNP hoped it would be, emphasised the lack of control which the Scots had over their own affairs; and the Scottish military tradition, so important an element of Unionism, was undermined by amalgamations among ...”

“... prosecuted for reprinting Wilkes’s seditious attack on George III in the 45th number of the North Briton in 1765, a vast crowd cheered Williams, passed him flowers and orchestrated a public ‘execution’ of clothing intended to symbolise the hated former prime minister Lord Bute. For the arch-Tory John Shebbeare, whose Sixth Letter to the People of ...”