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“... even masts, and with captured cordage. This authority did not come from his being a nobleman – James Cook had as much or more, and his father was a farm labourer. It was rather a matter of size, spiritual size, vast stores of animal spirits and eagerness for battle, great professional ability, even physical bulk – he ate far, far too much and he was ...”

“... hollow and empty as the space between stars’, or Ellroy’s benzedrine-driven hyper-kinetics, or James M. Cain’s rat-a-tat ‘let’s get stinko’ hard-boiled self-consciousness. Flatness is Willeford’s style; metaphor is mistrusted, so is interiority, both the author’s and the characters’. At the end of The Way We Die Now, the last Moseley book and ...”

“... phonology and morphology is by Roger Lass (Cape Town), that on Middle English dialectology is by James Milroy (Sheffield), on syntax by Olga Fischer (Amsterdam), and the chapter entitled ‘Lexis and Semantics’ by David Burnley (Sheffield). Each volume is well indexed and each has its own quite lengthy ‘Glossary of Linguistic Terms’. The fairly low ...”

“... the maelstrom of London life, which Cath undertakes in the company of two admirable young friends, James and Boy William. Cast adrift in the capital, these three innocents move from milieu to milieu as rapidly as one of Dickens’s protagonists. To call both them and the types they run up against ‘Dickensian’ is indeed to acknowledge David Cook’s ...”

“... because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. James Lovelock, in his powerful and extremely depressing book The Revenge of Gaia, says this: I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most ...”

“... Samuel Beckett endlessly redistributes 16 stones among four pockets, and John Cage copies a star-atlas onto music paper. In the messier room across the hall, Karlheinz Stockhausen untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That all these are denatured ...”

“... hoodwink the Land of Liberty and Justice for All needs to read Songs of the Doomed: part political atlas, part morning paper and part adventure novel, Songs is three remarkable books on the fatal condition of America. Hunter’s a journalist first and foremost, and he’s one of the last honest members of a profession blackened and lame from 11 years of ...”

“... the idea of competition redundant. Like so many others in Silicon Valley, Thiel read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a young man and continues to pursue her ideal of the fearless businessman who is prepared to take no prisoners in creating something new. The condition of progress is to change the rules of the game. For that reason, Thiel remains sceptical of ...”

“... exhibition catalogues (the Folger Library’s The Reader Revealed) and maps (Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel). Book history doesn’t just cross disciplines, it mixes media. But it would be unfair to ask one volume to circumscribe what’s not really a ‘field’ so much as a junction. Pity the scholar torn (in Robert Darnton’s ...”

“... on his novel, ‘Tangier’ (first line: ‘Autumn came later that year to the rif of the Low Atlas, and Carson was having an embarrassing time staying publicly sober’), wrote some magazine pieces, accepted a job as a sportswriter, broke the news to X, who ‘thought it all sounded just fine’, and settled down to raise a family. Ralph (b. 1970) was ...”

“... just as there was to Shakespeare’s choice of a fable that must have resonated uncomfortably with James VI and I’s vision of a reunited island of ‘Great Britain’. By the same token Shakespeare’s more direct engagements with the classical world carried their own ideological freight – and enable a different understanding of the stubborn persistence of ...”

“... between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. James Fenton, ‘A German Requiem’ The topic of international space is like one of those monstrous catfish which used to loaf around the hot-water outfalls of the Berlin power stations. You could hook it, net it, spear it, or even seize it in your arms if it ...”

“... but the title of the engraving identifies the volume as Voyage autour du monde, a historical atlas and record of Louis de Freycinet’s second expedition to the South Seas in 1817. According to the catalogue of the National Library of Australia, ‘Sauvages des environs de la rivière Nepean’ is Plate 100 in the folio and it is the work of two artists ...”

“... of my vodka allowance wore off after a couple of days. The only thing of value was an enormous atlas which I brought back strapped to the luggage rack of my car. It was in any case somewhat difficult to read. But payment was not the question, pirates and exploiters though the Russian publishers were in those days. I had thought the translation of Key to ...”

“... words of Gerry Canavan, who in 2013 became the first scholar to open them. Butler had been reading James Lovelock and thinking about what would happen if humans migrated to other worlds while continuing to be ‘part of an earth organism in some literal way’: ‘phantom-limb pain’ was a phrase she used in the notes in the boxes. ‘A somehow neurologically ...”