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“... if at all, in equally essentialist terms, as the Oriental mystic who taught Americans to do yoga. Ruth Harris, who confesses that she has never taken to yoga, argues that both representations miss the point. Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years ...”

“... the sort of scorn and vitriol that French freethinkers once directed at the Roman Catholic Church. Ruth Harris’s book exemplifies the promise of this approach rather than its excesses. Pasteur appears only incidentally in its pages, yet he lurks behind them, for the book’s great theme is precisely the confrontation between modern, scientific, secular ...”

“... went up to Cambridge in 1938, he intended to become a medical missionary, and met his first wife, Ruth Harris, at Congsoc (the University Congregational Society). Soon she was ‘washing his test tubes’ and they were tacitly engaged, though they wouldn’t have sex until 1943, when they got married.Early in the war, as he began his practical medical ...”

“... the mobility of our souls.In her book on the Dreyfus Affair, The Man on Devil’s Island (2010), Ruth Harris insists that no ‘dark teleology’ links the 1890s in France with the years between the two world wars. ‘There is no straight line that can be drawn from the conflicts of the Fin de Siècle to the emergence of fascism in the 1930s,’ she ...”

“... for ‘Dreyfusism and its work’. This could mean many things but at its broadest it meant, as Ruth Harris says in The Man on Devil’s Island (2010), a devotion to truth and justice as distinct from tradition and honour. After what Oriol describes as a ‘relatively moderate’ plea by the prosecution, and an attempt by the defence to get back to the ...”

“... holy in her honour: labouring children were invoking a union rep on high to get them a day off. As Ruth Harris illuminated in her book about Lourdes, a coalition of women – from a pauper like the visionary herself, Bernadette Soubirous, to the philanthropic grandes dames who championed her truthfulness – formed to articulate a policy for the Church ...”

“... in the insomniac hours, the former vice president had a convalescent look.What possessed the Biden-Harris campaign to approach their victory as a foregone conclusion may never be known: it seems, at any rate, to have been a tight operation, unlikely to extrude the usual mass of memoirs. Kamala Harris might have been supposed ...”

“... Robert Harris’s first novel, Fatherland (1992), was a counterfactual historical thriller set in Nazi Germany in 1964. In the alternative reality of the book, Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the Caucasus in 1943, lured the Royal Navy to its destruction after learning that the British had cracked the Enigma code, and intimidated the United States into signing a peace treaty by successfully testing an atom bomb and launching an intercontinental V3 rocket across the Atlantic ...”

“... is given in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English) is itself impressive: Noam Chomsky, Ruth Kempson, Sidney Greenbaum, Dwight Bolinger, P.H. Matthews, Sven Jacobson, M.A.K. Halliday, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich ...”

“... when I didn’t apply myself to the task with the eagerness of a lover.’ When his first wife, Ruth, had some friends to tea and Wainwright came home unexpectedly from the office, she shooed them out of the house: ‘Everybody out,’ she cried, ‘he’s back!’ His son Peter shared Wainwright’s walks when he was a boy. Touching black and white ...”

“... Marxist and feminist. He doesn’t, on the face of it, seem the type. It’s a merit of Jocelyn Harris’s book nevertheless to demonstrate sensitively and without pretentious haranguing that Richardson ‘speaks ... to feminist concerns’ and played an honourable part in ‘the “fair sex debate” ’ (the phrase suggests how anachronistic it is, as Mrs ...”

“... else. In one case, she points out to a colleague conducting a post-mortem the stripes – ‘Harris lines’ – visible on the X-rays of the skeleton of a boy who had killed himself. Harris lines are caused by periods of intense stress, as if the child’s body recognises that although obliged to continue growing, it ...”

“... with considerable flair. While most pieces have some virtues, some are really exceptionally good. Ruth Harris’s account in Volume Two of the feud between Charcot’s Paris school and Bernheim’s coterie at Nancy, over the value (and risks) of hypnosis and the nature of the hypnotic state, moves elegantly from an account of one of France’s more ...”

“... and versifiers, all born in the 1830 and 1840s: Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, Joel Chandler Harris and, lion among them, Mark Twain. With O. Henry, born a decade later, we are already moving out of the oral tradition, with its loose-limbed jogtrot rhythms and its shameless delight in red herrings and shaggy dogs, its weakness for pratfalls and ...”

“... became a success at the Union and worked up his debating skills on an American tour with Kenneth Harris and Edward Boyle. The tour allowed for an excited response to the vigour and variety of American civilisation, which many young Englishmen have felt; though not many young Englishmen in New York got to stay with Reinhold Niebuhr. The Oxford letters and ...”