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“... can do is to say: try doing it my way; try describing what goes on in my terms; perhaps you may find that I have given you better tools with which to achieve your ends. The philosophers who will most dislike Dennett’s book – those who will be most convinced that he has merely explained consciousness away – are those who believe that some of the ...”

“... must have increased his unpopularity with his jailers. ‘No matter what precautions I may take I am quite certain that these convulsions and spasms, not to mention the physical pain, can be heard as far as the Faubourg St Antoine.’ Sade was always attracted by ‘vice’ and, as he wrote from his cell at Vincennes in 1782, ‘always thought that ...”

“... of an incredibly talented black weaver. People asked me how my ideas related to Foucault or Richard Rorty. A painter, Swedish by origin, of great intensity as was his work, talked to me of the problems of South Africa. They were not political problems, he said, they were cultural problems. They were problems of communication and of creativity. The ...”

“... Conservative precepts. The private sector knows, and grows, best. The City is untouchable: it may be chastised, but never seriously confronted. Unemployment is a form of dependency, best dealt with through market discipline. Competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it is the role of the state to encourage it and to secure public ...”

“... Within a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (crafted in Pakistan or North Korea) may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but also the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever ...”

“... of the early 1920s. Price levels in January 1946 were more than five trillion times those of May 1941. The exchange rate for the gold sovereign in the autumn of 1944, shortly after the liberation, stood at 170 trillion drachmas. By that time, Davis’s pile of notes would scarcely have been enough to buy a loaf of bread. Commentators on the current ...”

“... awe they cast behind them. Pavlov stressed that conditioning could be anticipatory, that the dog may salivate on the expectation rather than the stimulus of bell or food – and this implies far more active, spontaneously active, processes than reflex arcs. This book describes Pavlov’s background, though we learn little of his personal life, beyond his ...”

“... is a culture of narcissism. If you rather admire these people’s attitudes and way of life, you may describe it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it is a culture of authenticity. Taylor says that we ought neither to boost this culture (in the manner of the truly dreadful ...”

“... culture eleven thousand years ago. The Clovis tribes were hunters of such efficiency that they may have exterminated the mammoth, the mastodon and the giant sloth, and several dozen other species besides. Mankind evidently had blood on its hands from the first. Mithen takes us to Australia, to wonder at the adaptability of its early inhabitants in the face ...”

“... Colm Tóibín’s frustrating new novel starts from a pleasingly skewed perspective: its narrator Richard Garay (less often, Ricardo) was brought up in Buenos Aires, child of an Argentinian businessman and an English woman who never adjusted to her new surroundings and clung in imagination to a country she had left in the early Twenties ...”

“... in view of the fact that anti-semitism plays a virtually negligible role in Theweleit’s book. It may simply be the case that what Theweleit is describing is not a political phenomenon in the conventional sense at all: that his analysis may be equally applicable to soldiers, secret policemen and torturers of left-wing as ...”

“... Rousseau’s Confessions with its stirring opening – ‘I am like no one else in the world. I may be no better, but at least I am different’ – modern autobiography, as a literary form has set itself the aim of recording, not so much a person who has lived through unique events, as a unique person. It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether this ...”

“... misses his ‘scattershot stupidity’, and falls slightly back in love with Stephen. They may not have a baby to care for, but they have the titular Wallcreeper, the bird that caused the opening car accident. They pin bits of food to a pegboard on the wall so that the bird can eat while perching in the manner to which it is accustomed. Stephen names ...”

“... are very tightly-laced and you cut at your peril. A snatch of dialogue or narrative on page 20 may be a plant for a twist in the story on page 220. Wodehouse himself could cut his novels when occasion demanded – i.e. when the payment for a shorter version was big enough. Sometimes top-paying American magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, would ...”

“... individual effort required to produce it. If Winchester has his way, Smith’s portrait may yet appear on the £10 note, and the ‘father of English geology’ nudge Darwin off it. Smith was fortunate to have first studied the strata around Bath, where the rock succession provided a ready key to his understanding. He was also blessed with unusual ...”