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“... a Harvard professor and Unitarian minister, his mother came from a distinguished Boston family. William James introduced the pair and became one of Edward Estlin’s godfathers. As well as the grand house at 104 Irving Street where he was born, Cummings’s family had a summer house in New Hampshire, which he would enjoy until the end of life. He died ...”

“... alive) like the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally ...”

“... at what was then Columbian University, now George Washington University in Washington DC. James Mooney, an ethnographer at the Smithsonian, had acquired dried buttons of the mescaline-containing peyote cactus in Oklahoma from the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. The first experimental subject, a 27-year-old chemist, stretched out on the bed in his ...”

“... Whitman (‘the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism’), and William James (‘an impassioned empiricism ... declaring the universe to be wild and young’). The Californian ‘humorists’ referred to by Santayana were the product, primarily, of a distinct historical phenomenon – the mining towns which sprang up ...”

“... on what religion is all about, all the diverse ways in which it continues to move millions. When William James gave his lectures on the varieties of religious experience, he wasn’t speaking of boxes full of anthropological data, but of lived experience. Of course it is important to test the hypothesis that prayer reduces stress, or that old people are ...”

“... source of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible. Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I ...”

“... Kenneth Koch (pronounced ‘coke’) could do a mean impersonation of William Carlos Williams. ‘This is Just to Say’, Williams’s note asking forgiveness for eating the plums in the icebox which ‘you were probably/saving/for breakfast’ on the grounds that they were ‘so sweet/and so cold’, gets the Koch treatment in ‘Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams’: I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer ...”

“... a profit. He was the public face of an ideological shift which saw libertarian economists such as James Buchanan, acting in concert with the right-wing zealot Charles Koch and lobbyists for corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors, disseminating radical ideas through a pliable media and a new curriculum for ...”

“... innovation of constructing an interlocking system of classes, terms and names was so significant, William Whewell argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific ...”

“... in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true that the Anglo-American political culture holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael ...”

“... he ironically offered them his condolences for the death of their ancestor Hector. Charting what William James called ‘the proper bounds of lachry-mosity’ is an enterprise which is unlikely to generate unanimity. The same is true of apprehension. At one end of the continuum we have the Grimm Brothers’ Clever Else overwhelmed by the thought of a ...”

“... the scene now of renewed challenges to its legitimacy. He doesn’t mention Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the great American theorists of church-state separation. He says nothing about the repeated efforts to amend the notoriously ‘godless’ constitution by inserting God’s name in it, or the more recent claims that God has been hiding there all ...”

“... was pragmatic: it was true because it worked for people who tried it. Sara Bull suggested to William James that he write a preface to Rāja Yoga. James, the son of a Swedenborgian, yearned for a more open-ended model of selfhood, which could account for religious experience without resorting to an outmoded ...”

“... memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard on headphones is ...”

“... Edith Wharton once asked Henry James why it was that his novels so curiously lacked real life. James’s private name for her was the ‘Angel of Devastation’, and the fact that she not only perpetrated this remark but went on to record it expressionlessly in her memoirs shows just what he meant ...”