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“... it does and does not belong in our lives – but we rarely stop to ask what the term actually means. Instead, we try to make sense of it in conjunction with words that may come with it, and which we can understand well enough on their own – words like ‘welfare’, ‘intervention’, ‘sanction’, ‘control’, ‘security’. During the Eighties ...”

“... The resemblance is established in Shadow Sites I (2010), which reinscribes by means of its own kind of graphic manoeuvre an already existing inscription. A shadow site is a built structure invisible at ground level, but thrown into dramatic relief when viewed from above by the slant of the sun’s rays at dawn or dusk. At such moments, the ...”

“... bars by a factor of 400 just so that the remaining uncertainties can be made visible on the page. David Weintraub’s new book, How Old Is the Universe?, captures the spirit of this post-lonely-hearts era. Weintraub, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University, offers a patient tour of the new data-rich landscape. Where Overbye had focused on the outsized ...”

“... reported the imminent introduction of steam-powered elevators into private homes in New York, by means of which an ‘indolent, or fatigued, or aristocratic person’ could reach the upper floors. Confusingly, there was another engineering Otis around, Otis Tufts, who in 1859 patented an apparatus known as the Vertical Railway or Vertical Screw Elevator. The ...”

“... meant to work, and therefore to show all its working parts in turn’. To know about imagination means to insist that it is a machine rather than a mystery, and to insist on demonstrating how the machine works. Such is the temperament precociously active in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and still volatile in Using biography (1984). The pieces collected ...”

“... and his defence of the war in Iraq. Progressivism is a difficult doctrine to pin down. If it means anything, it means a readiness to unshackle the problems of politics from the apparent certainties of the past, in order to identify where change is possible. It is an assault on the conservative assumption that nothing ...”

“... impossible to think seriously about the broader ramifications of what he was saying. It just means that it’s necessary to divorce what was said from the devious and somewhat desperate politician who was saying it. Blair’s basic argument is easily confused with what is often called the doctrine of pre-emption, which states that in the war on terrorism ...”

“... is only death here now.’ Only death apart from her and the severed head of an android called David. She is going to connect him to his separated body, and he will steer the ship to another planet. They haven’t got on well during the movie – ‘We have had our differences,’ the android says in his formal, English manner – but perhaps need and ...”

“... When​ the Australian cricketers Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were exposed tampering with the ball during last year’s test series in South Africa there was, along with all the faux outrage, some genuine incredulity. Why did they take such an insane risk? The subterfuge was so cack-handed – rubbing the ball with lurid yellow sandpaper, perfectly suited to be picked up by the TV cameras – and the potential rewards so slight that they seemed to be putting their careers on the line for next to nothing ...”

“... that Wilson was a KGB plant led to rumoured attempts by MI5 and others to undermine him by any means necessary. Even in 1982, these stories seemed to be going out with the tide. Benn had lost the Labour deputy leadership contest to Healey in 1981 – it was a close-run thing, but it was also the closest he would ever get to the top. Michael Foot, the party ...”

“... disparity up to American exceptionalism, but that’s more a slogan than an explanation. And as David Garland points out in Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, on this and many other matters of criminal justice, the United States is not so much a single nation as a federation of 50 states, each of which has substantial ...”

“... he can never disown. Most voters, even among the baffled undecideds, know exactly what it means and have an unsentimental grasp of the changes a Tea Party government would ...”

“... country parties.’ Since emissions reductions involve immense economic costs, this essentially means that no limits can be placed on the emissions of developing countries. Their responsibility to reduce emissions isn’t ‘differentiated’ so much as non-existent. Subsequent climate change negotiations have reinforced this position, and it is stated as ...”

“... of what he calls ‘drilling down’ when faced with a seemingly intractable problem. What this means is being willing to go back to first principles, ‘behind and beneath the conventional’ analysis, and if necessary to look at the problem from a completely new angle. Time and again, when faced with a political difficulty, Blair takes himself away from ...”

“... In a characteristically versatile display of cultural, technological and economic history, David Landes looks at the evolution of the clock as a machine, and at the triumph of public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and ...”