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“... evolutionism of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which ...”

“... met a similar fate. In 1995, Helen wrote to President Clinton; so did Margaret McKinney, whose son Brian had also been ‘disappeared’. Clinton’s intervention ensured that the issue became part of the negotiations that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In 1999, the House of Commons set up a Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains which ...”

“... the eastern oil town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. (Granada Television had enlisted me to act as Brian Moser’s consultant on a World in Action documentary.) At La Esperanza, we found the commander, Major Ralph ‘Pappy’ Shelton, a Korean veteran, in an expansive mood. With a handful of senior American officers he was celebrating the end of the six-month ...”

“... For anyone with a teenage daughter their scabrous subject-matter is hard to take. They would scare Martin Amis. It needed a true appreciation of literary talent to spot their quality. The same true appreciation ensures that the prose in the LRB rarely falls below a certain standard and that the level of argument is kept up. Not all of the best LRB writers are ...”

“... Revolution in climate change, when a period of poor harvests acted as what the anthropologist Brian Fagan has called ‘a subtle catalyst’ for the insurrection. The tone of Antonio Stradivari’s violins has been attributed to the denser wood that trees lay down in cold weather. Incessant rain confined several English Romantics to Byron’s Swiss villa ...”

“... Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s ...”

“... about their echoes and consequences in the so-called real world. In this he would be unlike Brian De Palma, or the Coen brothers, who understand and exploit the shock value of violence; and even more unlike Oliver Stone, who has thought about violence and then forgotten what he thought. Tarantino in an interview (the same interview is excerpted in the ...”

“... introduced to by a friend. Each piece has a picture at the top drawn by the illustrator Charles Martin in the style of a fashion shoot. The words and music stand in for captions. ‘Le Golf’, for example, tells a story about a cocky colonel’s comeuppance on the links:The colonel is wearing shocking green ‘Scotch Tweed’.He will be victorious.His ...”

“... sound or dead recording sound’, a multitude of tracks laid down under the supervision of George Martin and Paul McCartney. And not long after the old production values have come under fire, so has the material itself. Again, the issue is mediation, a lack of feeling or veracity in the fanciful little narratives – ‘Eleanor Rigby’ comes to mind – that ...”

“... prisoners of war rather than regular inmates. The IRA leadership, which included Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, wanted a show of strength and it was perfectly willing to see its men starve themselves to death to make its point. The more intransigent the British were, the better, since the IRA was confident it had the greater appetite for the long ...”

“... the vocalist makes his entry. It’s Tony Bennett singing ‘From Rags to Riches’. The film is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). All kinds of things are going on here, artful, intelligent, violent and ironic. The broadest effect is that of the song, with its implication of a sarcasm as old as gangster movies themselves. Organised crime is a paradigm ...”

“... Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status is, among other things, to show an ignorance of the discipline’s history. (Wittgenstein, Anscombe’s beloved teacher, was ...”

“... traumatised Hong Kong, however, and produced the nearest it has had to a tribune of the people: Martin Lee, now 59, the son of a Kuomintang general who fled to Hong Kong, rather than Taiwan, in 1949. The younger Lee, trained in Lincoln’s Inn, became a leader of the Hong Kong Bar, a member of the Legislative Council, and of the Basic Law Drafting Committee ...”

“... disclosed by companies jumped from just over £8 million to over £15 million. Major-General Sir Brian Wyldbore-Smith, the Party’s director of fund-raising activities between 1980 and 1992, has been reported as saying that the Party received £7 million from foreign backers just before the 1992 election. The honours system has been deployed in a way which ...”

“... been murdered here: a mobile shop blown up; two community policemen shot; a girl called Bernadette Martin with a Protestant boyfriend shot in the middle of the night. There had been more than 120 deaths in this town since the start of the Troubles. ‘Nobody trusts the police,’ he said. ‘There’s even a credibility gap between the RUC and the Protestant ...”