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“... within a given culture. The cultural relativism of Emile Durkheim and others, elegantly renewed by Clifford Geertz and orthodox in large parts of the academic community is based on a serious underestimation of the genetic determinants of human nature, and a false view of mental development. It’s partly for this reason, and partly because I have a Kantian ...”

“... match between subject and author make the series distinctive. The ‘concept’, as its editor James Atlas explained to me a few years ago, is to produce books that airline passengers can read on a flight from New York to San Francisco and finish before they reach the Golden Gate. Given the entertainment options available at 35,000 feet this is not an ...”

“... calculated strike against the old novelistic tendency to connect moral and physical impotence (Sir Clifford Chatterley and his wheelchair, Rochester’s blindness). It is also, I think, a long joke at the expense of a punitive tradition that has linked homosexuality with illness or deformity of one kind or another; Denton Welch, the patiently analytical ...”

“... are there too: Theodore Dreiser, who wrote well about department stores in Sister Carrie, and Clifford Odets, who believed shopping was one of America’s chronic diseases. After seeing the graves and spending an hour in the sweltering heat I went to the Glendale Galleria, not only a shopping mall of epic proportions but a space of infinite reprieve, with ...”

“... the great elm clump at Grantchester; – bathing in early morning by Oxford; – the heights above Clifford Bridge camp; – a thousand times when we’ve gone hand in hand – as no other two people could; – – twice this year 1 felt your tears, Noel’s tears, on my hand. There are such things, such things that bind us ... I cannot live without you. I ...”

“... The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding’. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes – sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which ...”

“... his subject that it is something of a small triumph to be able to point out an error: it was not James Sherard who was the Consul at Smyrna but his even more avidly botanical brother William. Curiously, the author has conflated the two and consequently misidentified the person whose name is commemorated in the Oxford ...”

“... I first came across James Boyce five years ago, when he wrote the lead essay in a collection called Whitewash, intended to argue against the ruthlessly revisionist ‘frontier history’ of Keith Windschuttle. In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), Windschuttle had argued that, contrary to the claims of various ideologically driven left-leaning historians, very few Tasmanian Aborigines had died in conflict with whites ...”

“... the printers) the distinction can’t be quite so clear. There’s talk in these essays of Henry James dictating to Mary Weld (she records that it took 194 days to dictate The Wings of the Dove but makes no mention of content or quality) and of Erle Stanley Gardner’s fiction factory, with his suite of Della Streets banging out the latest Perry Mason ...”

“... Carlyle, Dickens, Trollope, Clough, Hawthorne, Browning, George Eliot, Hardy, Arnold and Henry James. In many cases, the editors have singled out Hutton in their introductions as outstandingly shrewd and appreciative among contemporary critics. We clearly need to have a new selection of his best essays. Hutton’s concern was always to see how far, and how ...”

“... The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently resourceful mind, and a persuasive style, of course, you can stimulate them by going for a walk along the local beach ...”

“... sustained correspondence, but which gives a good indication of his social or professional circle: James Mason, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso. There are letters related to and surrounding the making of particular films: The River, Le Carrosse d’ or, Elena et les hommes. These really do provide detailed information on how the screenplays are put ...”

“... redefinitions of its meaning. Yet it might be asserted as a general rule that other cultures (say, Clifford Geertz’s Bali) possess political structures and means of debating them. The present volume takes us to Italy and Spain, France and England, the Netherlands and Germany, but not to Catholic, let alone Orthodox, Eastern ‘Europe’, or into the vigorous ...”

“... could provide the constant supply of fresh air desired by many sleepers: the Norfolk clergyman James Woodforde took thermometer readings every night to ensure his bedchamber was suitably cool. Fires – like bedwarmers – ensured a warm bed but could give off noxious smoke, as well as posing more significant risks. Scents and soporifics could make ...”