Search Results

“... had sent a group of astronomers into the desert for the same purpose. The advantage of Biruni’s method was that it ‘did not require walking in deserts’. He simply calculated the height of one of the mountains and the angle it formed with the horizon on the plain below. He could then construct a triangle, one of whose sides was the height of the ...”

“... Richard Pipes, Russian historian at Harvard and sometime member of President Reagan’s National Security Council, is famous for his hatred of Communism. He doesn’t like Russia much, either. Nor does he particularly care for most Russia and Soviet experts, regarding them as given to romanticising and whitewashing their subject ...”

“... the past this technique doesn’t work: by definition, Russians are not talking Soviet anymore. So Yurchak had to become a quasi-historian and look for documentation of past ways of talking, which he did quite ingeniously. It helped that he was a native Soviet speaker. ‘The last Soviet generation’ is Yurchak’s ...”

“... J. Hoberman’s book, appropriately enough, is a cinematic montage of reflections on the long-drawn-out demise of the former Soviet Union, seen through the eyes of a New York journalist and film critic: a process that began with the death of Stalin and ended with the sale of chunks of the Berlin Wall in Bloomingdale’s ...”

“... stories begin, at the bedside – with the taking of a history and an appraisal of the patient’s general health. The history would be loss of weight, debility and general malaise, of intractable thirst, the continual passing of urine that led to a 17th-century London surgeon’s describing diabetes as the ‘pissing ...”

“... about the campuses: a distinct lightness of being, despite the stony masses of the buildings. It’s partly an effect of the heavy deployment of architectural pastiche to create the illusion of antiquity, but it may also have to do with the fact that many of these institutions arose as much out of vanity or whim as necessity. If some magnate hadn’t been ...”

“... spasms, do you think, like synchronised oysters … or is one both at once?’ The book’s author, Theodore J. Faithfull, described on the title page as ‘principal of the Priory Gate School’, had something altogether less strenuous in mind. To him, bisexuality did not concern sexual preference. Rather, it was a way to acknowledge the bipolar ...”