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“... a machine powered by the soul, and the mysteries of birth were no longer mysteries but physical laws that might be understood if a woman’s parts could be isolated, identified, diagrammed. Birth figures once depicted only soft flesh, but now paid close attention to the pelvis, the tailbone. How did it all fit together? How did a foetus rotate within the ...”

“... continued ever since. Perhaps the most serious accusations were levelled by the British journalist John Cornwell, whose book Hitler’s Pope, published in 1999, in effect painted Pius XII as a Nazi sympathiser. Decades before his election as pope on 2 March 1939, Eugenio Pacelli had served as papal nuncio to Bavaria, and in this capacity had witnessed the ...”

“... but probably also to distance himself from an episode of family humiliation: in Joseph Knight v. John Wedderburn, an enslaved man had successfully sued his owner, James Wedderburn’s brother, winning his freedom and forming a precedent that made life difficult for slave owners in Scotland. Andrew Colvile wrote to Bell’s claiming that his father had ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The Waste Land; to James Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James ...”

“... have taken a very different line, and in their chapter on the general law of medical negligence John Finch and Robert Cowley (respectively an academic and a practising lawyer) commend them for doing so. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that what is a reasonable risk to a doctor is not always so to the patient, and that to allow medical judgment ...”

“... a group of Parisian nominalists of whom the most radical was Jacques Almain, the most significant John Mair (1467-1550) – a Scot who taught Knox and Buchanan long before the Protestant Reformation. John Pocock is so dazzling in ‘Authority and Property: the Question of Liberal Origins’ that one has to rub one’s eyes ...”

“... is necessarily at fault, according to the poem, but it has to be kept in balance, ‘under laws/Of disciplined sensibility’, as in 17th-century Wit. When these disciplines of social use are lost, a mind has to be heroic, like Pushkin’s, to maintain the law of sound imagining. The law, if it held, would state that we are diseased    When the ...”

“... domestic: they are full of husbands and wives, rather than lovers and girlfriends, of in-laws, aunties, the rubble of toys on the living-room floor, jobs (and failing to get jobs), holidays (family packages to the South of France and Morocco figure prominently as the outer limits of the exotic). Since Larkin and Douglas Dunn’s Terry Street, the ...”

“... of popular music, spinning the Beatles in a new direction. Meeting Shankar changed things for John Coltrane, too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy ...”

“... and unfortunate.Or this from Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2005):Although mathematical truths of various kinds had been surmised since ancient Egyptian and Babylonian times, it was not until the great Greek philosophers Thales of Miletus (c.625-547 BC) and Pythagoras of Samos (c.572-497 BC) began to ...”

“... obligation and behaviour for more than two millennia. In Gilead, Robinson’s dying preacher, John Ames, ruminates that we are ‘a little civilisation built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilisations’, and the explicit argument of Reading Genesis is that we fail adequately to understand this patrimony. We are diminished by this, and so is ...”

“... but useful in providing provisional relief: some of these things are finely dealt with in John Wiltshire’s Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, recently reviewed in this paper. This is yet another way of being literal-minded, characteristically Johnsonian and quite remote from anything specifically ‘oriental’. Johnson’s Orient is, perhaps ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... the natives are cruel and irrational, in need of guidance and tips and the wisdom of Western laws and the bright, clear line of Western narrative. Bowles’s trick as a narrator is to make each side as unreliable as the other. While one side merely look like animals, the others, travelling with money and attitude, act like animals whenever they can, or ...”