Search Results

“... any interest it might have for strangers would be antiquarian: it was a relic from a time, not so long ago, when for the aspiring young the printed word, and that special kind of it called literature, was a medium not seriously challenged by any other. That time was surely gone, I thought, and printed literature now had a hard time claiming even parity with ...”

“... shelf life of Vestiges for 15 years until the Origin was published – and it continued to sell long afterwards. The compelling thing about the book’s anonymity was that different social groups could each invent their own author. In aristocratic circles authorship was attributed to one of their own – Sir Richard Vyvyan was a popular candidate at ...”

“... anti-clericalism, would not go the whole way with the German monist Ernst Haeckel in denying a long-term purpose built into an original creation. Such qualifications will be familiar to students of Early Victorian science. But until now one dichotomy has remained more or less intact: the contrast between a positivist philosophy of science shared by the ...”

“... middling size – a number that will baffle all the efforts of man to exterminate.’ People have long enjoyed marvelling at the sheer amount, the endlessness of cod. The vast cod-grazing grounds off the American Atlantic coast may well have drawn the very first Europeans to the continent: Mark Kurlansky provides evidence that not only Viking explorers but ...”

“... of organic evolution. It is clear from his notes that he understood the succession required long periods of time, but he seems not to have troubled greatly with theoretical speculation. If his clergymen friends saw evidence of the Flood, so be it. Nonetheless, his steadfast and pragmatic assemblage of facts was to be one of the sources of evidence to ...”

“... woman’ did take place. He had managed it himself. He had wrestled free of the infantile trauma. Long before his meeting with Freud. The Master helped him with his permission, but that was all that mattered. Who are we to believe here? The poignant fact is that the ‘breakthrough to the woman’ was not enough. No sooner had he married Therese, than his ...”

“... The English, the French and the Oyster, the extent to which the oyster had been lost to England long before I imbibed the idea of one as part of British myth. Oysters were common in Britain until the mid-19th century. ‘What I mean, sir,’ says Sam in The Pickwick Papers, ‘is, that the poorer the place is, the greater call there seems to be for ...”

“... sexual deviance, but his Victorian readers had no trouble grasping his meaning. His was one in a long series of publications that insinuated a link between vagrancy and homosexuality (so effectively that public-order legislation came to conflate the two), while his essay was appropriated and reworked by middle-class men with sexual anxieties of their ...”

“... Sidgwick wrote slowly in both of two different senses. The process of composition was invariably long and painful; and what he composed was a form of expository prose that took a very long time to unveil its meaning, and which was characterised by endless hesitations and second thoughts, doubts and qualifications ...”

“... study which protected the human race from serious comparison with any other species. For quite a long time this enterprise succeeded. What has doomed it now is the flood of light thrown on the whole subject by the interesting, fertile and canon-free comparisons which have in the meantime been made, both in neurology and in the study of animal behaviour ...”

“... be derided – as a callowness in ourselves which the language that we use, British English, has long ago grown out of. We have shown ourselves to be less grown-up than the language that we attempt to bend to our immature purposes – an attempt that the language itself frustrates by appealing, implicitly and inevitably, to English-language-users more ...”

“... was cold, dark and bathed in acid rain. This ‘nuclear winter’ was sufficiently severe and long-lasting to halt photosynthesis on land and in the oceans, causing the collapse of those ecosystems that had survived the initial cataclysm. Some 70 per cent of living species were eliminated. Foremost among those that perished were the ...”

“... worth of precious specimens, including the live birds and monkeys he had carefully tended for so long. As the lifeboats hovered close to the wreck in the forlorn hope that the fire would attract rescuers, Wallace watched events turn even more poignant – several of the animals, he said, ‘had retreated to the bowsprit out of reach of the flames, appearing ...”

“... detective story, the ghost story should not be too up-to-date. ‘Thirty years ago’ or ‘Not long before the war’ were proper openings. Close enough in time, therefore, for the reader to think: ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me.’ The ghost ought to be a contemporary of the person who sees it, just as Hamlet’s ...”

“... thrashing her unmercifully, her face a mask of ferocity, caring little where the blows fell as long as they found a mark somewhere on Marie’s squirming body’). There is a mixture of the above two incidents when Hilary beats up and then nuzzles Margaret, an in this case guilty junior: (‘Lust had turned into anger, and anger into cruelty, and now ...”