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“... business as a popular novelist with grotesquely inappropriate equipment (Flaubert, Maupassant, James) and never really mastered the themes and the manner of popular romance. Above all, he chose to write English, which was not even his second language. Of course all these choices contributed to Conrad’s eventual triumph, though the last and possibly the ...”

“... all the people in the end is not a being but a theory’. The book has a cast of thousands: William James, Théodore Flournoy, Morton Prince (who failed to detect sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own poems), Otto Weininger (a ...”

“... radicalism of pre-war Greenwich Village, to Trotskyist left-oppositionism, to the conservatism of William F. Buckley’s National Review, seemed to exemplify the failures of socialism in the 20th century. In his final years Eastman himself was sometimes overcome by a sense of personal futility; he complained on his death bed that his life had been ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... stories. Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was in the manner of her admired Henry James, but it did not please her, nor did it make any mark in the world of fiction. (Her earlier book of poetry, notable in no way, had been self-published.) At college and afterwards, she had written stories about pioneer life, but she saw no special value in ...”

“... often left something to be desired, and so, gradually, dedicated auction houses began to appear. James Christie opened a saleroom in Pall Mall in 1766, and a nearby bookseller called Samuel Baker founded what became Sotheby’s, but the boom came with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Bonham’s was founded in 1793, Phillips’s in 1796, and by ...”

“... clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes ...”

“... in dorsal trauma. ‘Spinal irritation’ was a popular diagnosis at the time: Henry and William James acquired the disorder to sit out, as it were, the American Civil War. Their plucky sister Alice spent a lifetime in bed on account of her spinal affliction, the ‘dorsal trouble in the blood’ which ...”

“... scientists are generally warier about making prescriptions than they were in the days of William Shockley, the physicist and advocate of eugenics – at the unpardonable end of the spectrum – and Linus Pauling, the chemist and Vitamin C enthusiast, at the nutty end. Their efforts now go towards proving that they know everything there is to know ...”

“... papers not mentioned below, the contributions of Akeel Bilgrami, Tyler Burge, Michael Dummett and James Higginbotham include some particularly penetrating points. A major question arises for every type of content a belief may have. What is the relation between theories of those contents which individuate them by reference to truth conditions, and theories ...”

“... Lucozade. When I got home, I looked up Mary Douglas’s phrase and found she had lifted it from William James, who used it in a very different context, in a discussion of the theological justifications for evil. Evil, James writes, is a concept invented to describe ‘elements of the universe which may make no ...”

“... examination. Among its officers and members were Tennyson, Gladstone, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, William James, Henri Bergson, and scores of other persons with unimpeachable intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology ...”

“... writings on this subject Strawson admires, and in whom he finds allies: Descartes, Kant, Hume and William James in particular. It is also peppered with frequent interruptions from an interlocutor – set off in different type – who makes most of the objections that will occur to a careful reader. This is extremely helpful in following what is often an ...”

“... has not passed into that vigilant eye, felt all the leaps potential in that luxurious torpor?’ William James says of the tigers at Barnum’s menagerie, whose ‘existence, so intensely and vividly real’, caused him to feel ‘poignantly the unfathomableness of ontology’, that though their being is ‘so admirable that one yearns to be in some way ...”

“... other urban emporia of recycling, pawn-brokers’ shops; and almost sixty years before Yeats, James Russell Lowell had already seen that literature itself was the random stuff of visceral alchemy: ‘The somewhat greasy heap of the literary rag-and-bone picker is turned to gold by time.’ Much attention has been given to the 20th century’s predilection ...”