Search Results

“... Astronomers have penetrated billions of light-years into space, explained the changing states of stars from their birth to their death, postulated the existence of black holes in which matter disappears, and rightly or wrongly, pinpointed the origins of the universe to a moment in time. The work of neuroscientists demands the same kind of ingenious speculation and theorising and rests on the invention of just as many subtle techniques ...”

“... Of all professionals perhaps doctors are the most gullible; and psychiatrists are perhaps the most gullible of all doctors. Over the last hundred years they have treated mental illness with cold douches, removal of the ovaries or thyroid, castration, hysterectomy, cooling almost to the point of death (and at least once beyond it), extracting the teeth and tonsils, enucleating the cervix, drilling holes in the skull, inducing coma through insulin, using metrazol to cause convulsions and slashing through a large chunk of the frontal lobe ...”

“... real-world instances whose central thesis is that most of us make critical mistakes in reasoning. Stuart Sutherland teaches psychology at the University of Sussex, but his early career as a journalist may have sensitised him to human irrationality. Thus he begins his tour of the psychological literature on irrationality with a discussion of the so-called ...”

“... his publications – runs to 40 printed pages. He specialised in critical reprints of Tudor and Stuart literature, aiming to do for that period what Furnivall had done for early English with his Early English Texts Society. Arber’s referee, Henry Morley, calculated that his protégé had ‘already given wide currency to not fewer than 125 separate ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed by ...”

“... a genuine claim on the reader. Carcanet publish A Storm from Paradise, together with a reissue of Stuart Hood’s Carlino.* Carlino is straight autobiography, recording the author’s experiences with the Italian Resistance during the war. A Storm from Paradise has equally strong but less direct roots in Hood’s past. The novel imaginatively reconstructs a ...”

“... floor is gratefully scooped up. Other heavyweights in the collection are Fay Weldon and Francis Stuart. Weldon’s piece is an ironic unhappily-ever-after study of contemporary marriage, given in her familiar a-man-was-born-he-lived-and-he-died manner. Stuart’s ‘The Water Garden’ is a condensed novel, taking an ...”

“... and its intelligentsia 1968-86 and not allude to, among others, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, R.D. Laing, and the personnel of the New Statesman, would be to create another kind of absent centre. Caute solves this problem by resort to the teasing deceits of the Disraelian political romance. That is, he ...”

“... or ‘Christian Sentimentalists’, as Carlyle called them. Not the least offended was John Stuart Mill – an uneasy friend. Mill wrote a letter of refutation in the next issue of Fraser’s, pointing out, with a better grasp of colonial history and a more humane analysis than McQuirk’s, that for nearly two centuries had Negroes, many thousands ...”

“... ten or so named lovers. Ted’s wife is Evelyn, a social worker. Kate used to be married to Stuart, who now lives, amiably separated, in a basement, painting mould and rust in advanced artistic styles. Nothing much happens in the novel. A number of lives of modish desperation are illuminated; the world is getting harder and drabber, the London graffiti ...”

“... Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.Since her death in 1587, Mary Stuart has caused strange stirrings and vehement imaginings in those who have applied themselves to her case. In Schiller’s play, her jailer Paulet worries about an escape:I curse the task that is entrusted me,To keep this scheming vixen in my care.I wake in ...”

“... English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its original with many laughs. In_Doctor Criminale, the issue is more pointed. The narrative contains a series of prominent and very ...”

“... hands of the estate. Except for the period between 1861 and 1888 when it was merged in the vast Sutherland empire, it never had the funds to embark on any major change. The reason lay in the economic effects of family structure. Though the Cromartie family did not have to carry the burden of large families to be set up in the world, they had just as ...”

“... thought was a disturbing rather than a contemplative experience. As he put it in a review of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in 1859, when we are unsure of the truth of received ideas, what follows is not ‘constant meditation upon them’, as if we could dwell and rest in them, but, more critically, a ‘constant discussion of their grounds’. Those ...”

“... a lie depend on what we are being asked and what the consequences of telling the truth may be. As Stuart Hampshire intimated in the LRB more than thirty years ago, the question for Williams was how far he was willing to go with the particular; willing, that is, to accept that to live in a fully human way is to accept the contingency of our convictions and ...”