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“... and of the translation finally completed by 72 translators in 72 days; we read, at the end, of John Philoponus and his nearly successful attempts to win over the Arab conquerors in order to reprieve the library; and there is much, much more. In all this Canfora is not just telling a story: in the second part of the book he offers a series of detailed ...”

“... the Government wavering, the Tyneham campaigners played their last card. Lord Fenner Brockway took John Gould, a road-sweeper who was already among Tyneham’s most symbolised villagers, to 10 Downing Street. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Gould presented Harold Wilson with a wreath made of ivy picked from the ...”

“... The Beagle had been at sea for nearly four years, and, as he wrote to his Cambridge mentor, John Henslow, Charles Darwin was increasingly anxious to get home: ‘I look forward with joy and interest to [visiting the Galapagos], both as being somewhat nearer to England, & for the sake of having a good look at an active Volcano.’ He had cause to expect ...”

“... Years ago Sir John Plumb declared: ‘The past is dead.’ He didn’t add: ‘long live history.’ But try as historians will to put the past behind them, others are always resurrecting it and abusing it for their own purposes. Take the mindless mouthings of ‘Victorian values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted ...”

“... The apparent ‘thumb’ is a modification and extension of a small bone in the wrist. For Stephen Gould, this is a particular and fascinating fact, but it is also an illustration of a general principle. The principle is that evolution proceeds by tinkering with what is already there, and not by following the canons of optimal design. Had the panda been ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... In the concluding essay of an adventurous collection, Stephen Jay Gould observes that most ‘classic stories’ in science are wrong. There are good reasons why he is right. In their reconstruction of the past, practising scientists have been apt to celebrate the insight of those who anticipated their own ideas, tacitly dismissing those who were blind to where the future would lie ...”

“... forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself’. And the book introduces Joe Gould, the character who would become Mitchell’s dependant, shadow, mirror-image and bête noire. Mitchell first wrote about ‘blithe and emaciated Joe Gould’ in 1942, in a profile entitled ‘Professor Sea Gull’ – the ...”

“... the college manciple: ‘Are you asking me or are you telling me – peasant?’ Similarly, Tony Gould met a Chilean caballero, when they were Cambridge undergraduates, some thirty years ago. He was called Cristian Huneeus, a young man of landed family, a gentlemanly left-winger and already a published novelist. In those days, British readers were not so ...”

“... One of the most talked and written about musicians after World War Two, Glenn Gould quite consciously set about making himself interesting and eccentric. Most performers do, but Gould went beyond anyone. It helped a great deal that he had a phenomenal digital gift, a perfect memory, a very high intelligence, but in addition he was self-conscious and self-observant to an extent most other performers would scarcely be able to imagine ...”

“... on one side and Eldredge on the other. Eldredge is associated in this controversy with Stephen Jay Gould, his long-term research collaborator.* The disagreement, and the heat that it generates, are difficult for an outsider to understand, but they appear to have something to do with the way in which evolutionary theory is to be presented to a broader ...”

“... unaided by experiment or instruments, could arrive at exact knowledge. Some two centuries later, John Herschel, in his textbook, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), warned the novice that the human sense apparatus was too crude and subjective an instrument to discover anything of scientific moment. The senses, he argued, must be ...”

“... Millet, who painted rural life, carved welcoming paths into his landscapes, Rousseau, much like John Everett Millais in his late works, creates a buffer zone of tangled branches or impassable swamps. In An Avenue in Isle-Adam Forest (1849), the viewer glimpses an inviting glade framed by the forest’s dark canopy, but broken boughs and bushes bar the ...”