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“... pays particular attention to a level of perception in which the imagination is allowed to work freely, discovering new and surprising analogies, investing its experience with unusual and apparently inappropriate emotions. The simile is Raine’s favourite tool for this purpose, but it is quite wrong to conceive of these poems as being mere collections of ...”

“... the Scottish science of man is embedded deep in institutions. Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have become tutelar deities of campus and think-tank, the respected grandfathers of the social sciences and patron saints of the policy wonk. Yet, for all this familiarity, the otherness of the Scottish Enlightenment tends to elude us. Adam Ferguson ...”

“... got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did ...”

“... destructive of one’s personality ... I’ve lived my life in captivity, and, strange to say, a freely chosen captivity.’ She wryly remarks that no one asked her to take everything so seriously, but that it was ‘in my blood, its German component’. ‘If I get to live another time, I’ll know what to do.’ Living one’s life in captivity is a state ...”

“... results of science that has already been paid for with public money, and the practical case that freely accessible papers would be easier to validate and build on. The movement has made a lot of progress, at least in Europe, where the EU and many other funders, including UKRI and the Wellcome, have now stopped the paywalling of publications resulting from ...”

“... Repelled he may have been by the varying styles and degrees of vanity and pretension which were freely paraded in the literary ecosystem of which he formed part, but if they caused him to brood during the working day, they confirmed to him once he sat down to write that since publishing what you write is an inherently immodest act, you can by writing ...”

“... of Europe. Ireland has no share in this black record. Our country has this proud distinction – freely acknowledged by Jewish writers – of never having resorted to this un-Christian and barbarous treatment of an unfortunate people.’ The argument and controversy about the Jewish presence in Ireland which ensued in these years when Home Rule seemed a ...”

“... was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of ...”

“... gives me may expand the space for critical thought more than the privileges I enjoy erode it.’ John Hall, now at the University of Southampton, read history at Oxford but was seduced (his word) by Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy into historical sociology in the liberal tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. Wright’s ...”

“... prosecution, never existed. The four men, three arms-dealers called Michael Aspin, Eric Matson and John Taylor and a Lloyds underwriter called William Harper, were tried at the Old Bailey in early 1988. Aspin, Harper and Matson were found guilty and sent to prison – Aspin is still inside. Taylor was acquitted. Aspin, who was cast as the ringleader, pleaded ...”

“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”

“... more often acknowledged than explored. Fox’s concern is the imaginative literature of the age of John Skelton and Thomas More, and then of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey: literature which he believes to have been gravely undervalued, and which he commends not only for its intrinsic pleasures but as a rich historical source. What the most ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... information processing demands less and less energy as temperatures fall. Again, he says, John Barrow and Frank Tipler have argued for infinite information processing (and therefore infinite ‘subjective time’ for our appropriately odified descendants) in the final moments of a Big Crunch. Mental acrobatics could take ever tinier fractions of a ...”

“... lover Gaston Palewski (‘Colonel’), she reports that Odette Massigli is having an affair with John Lehmann, who had never liked women before’. ‘Are you shrieking, Colonel?’ One hopes that he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of ...”