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“... is to be gained by talk, particularly if it is stuffed with slogans about reductionism and holism. Christopher Wills is completely secure with genetic theory, and makes no attempt to belittle the beanbag model. The Wisdom of the Genes, a generally admirable book, suggests how modern genetics is leading evolutionary biologists away from the beanbag ...”

“... may mean only that the same minority was reading far more books. Ownership of books, recorded in wills, may be no more satisfactory as an indicator. Widespread ownership of Bibles does not prove that they were read, and anyway the casual way in which books are listed in inventories makes them an unreliable source. Nor can we quantify ‘the educational ...”

“... candidly and less attractively as the ‘do-gooder’. In a thoughtful and spirited article, Garry Wills once analysed the selfish commonplaces which underly the anti-do-gooder school. He was in a strong position to do so, having been a star at William F. Buckley’s National Review even while it was heaping praise on Tom Wolfe (as it still does). Wrote ...”

“... The Way of All Flesh, which came out in 1903, not much more than a decade before the begetting of Christopher Robin, in fact and in fiction. Milne may well have thought that he was destroying for ever that awful old father and son relationship, blowing away the tyranny and obfuscation, showing that age doesn’t matter, that nanny will give them sixpence each ...”

“... that obsession. Again, we knew some of this already. In his book The Kennedy Imprisonment, Garry Wills showed elegantly that the Cuba crisis Mark II – the missile confrontation in October 1962 – was intimately connected to the Cuba crisis Mark I – the Bay of Pigs and the incessant American-sponsored covert aggressions. Kennedy knew, in other ...”

“... sustained his rather dutiful-sounding devotion to his swami – in a shrewd preface to the diaries Christopher Hitchens speaks of Isherwood’s ‘amazing willingness to put up with the swami’ – which seems to have replicated something of his irritated devotion to his family, while the relationship with Bachardy became his true ‘means of ...”

“... Beza’s and Perkins’s theology ‘puts the knowledge of faith within the reach of anyone who wills to be godly’. One may have temporary faith, but the elect are those who persevere in holiness. Perkins goes so far as to say that ‘the will to believe is faith’; ‘and the desire to repent, repentance itself ... God accepting the will for the ...”

“... minority. Outsiders were exposed by their inability to do more than sign their names on documents (wills, contracts, leases) that were central to their livelihood. At the foot of otherwise competently drafted documents, their ‘tottery’ or ‘spindly’ signatures (the differences in handwriting are noted by Parsons) are the indelible marks of their ...”

“... revolution’?Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists for power ...”

“... punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a Christian. He told my parents, both churchgoing ...”

“... fairly sure to hear of in the course of his schooling, you would be wise to put your money on Sir Christopher Wren. I think the equivalent holds good in Turkey. At least, I am writing this review in a school exercise-book I bought in Istanbul: the front cover bears a portrait of Mimar Sinan, and its reverse side gives a brief biography and enumerates the ...”

“... And the cracks must have been visible back then too. In the first episode, the MP and broadcaster Christopher Mayhew checks himself in to Warlingham Park Hospital (over the hill from Netherne) in order to show the audience that far from being a place of ‘hopeless misery, raving, violence, weird uncanny behaviour’, the ward, with its warm ...”

“... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...”

“... mystifies this process by dissolving the antinomies and recognising only a contest of wills between rival claimants to power. ‘Critique has turned into discourse as the court of theoretical reason has turned into the court of practical reason.’ Such is the consequence of Foucault’s equating all forms of knowledge with the exercise of a power ...”

“... completely professional during the past three decades, tennis deserves a place of honour in what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism. A sport of skilful, well-mannered ladies and gentlemen has metamorphosed into a brutal confrontation between unpleasant, physically overdeveloped and remorselessly single-minded hitters, which is controlled by ...”