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“... by defining them provisionally in terms of ‘warranted assertability’. Truth is simply, as William James put it, ‘the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief’. Philosophy can keep itself in business by updating the story of those various beliefs which have proved themselves good (or philosophically productive) from time to ...”

“... label them as art. Francis Bacon turned his back on art when he used a book about positioning X-ray subjects as a source for his paintings. But even these pictures, while not exactly dignified, fit in the heroic/horrific tradition of Rembrandt’s flayed oxen and anatomy lessons. On the other hand, pictures which draw on the new images of X-rays and scans ...”

“... do no more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to ...”

“... According to Gordon Ray, writing in 1956, all that posterity could reasonably expect to know about the elusive Wilkie Collins was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries ...”

“... of writing that the medium which enshrines a culture can also be used to subvert a culture. William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible into English vernacular, knew this well, and so did his opponents. The issue which divided them was real. Tyndale was threatening to unleash a force that might unite society, but which might equally tear it apart. Do ...”

“... too politically self-conscious – the map at the back of Absalom, Absalom is clearly marked: ‘William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor’. But if a writer is not in some strong sense a coloniser, he risks being only a better informed, more alert tourist, and Rush’s Botswana has increasingly become an exotic stage set rather than a distinctive place ...”

“... a bad thing, then certainly one not worth spending time acquiring, was the no-nonsense ruralist William Cobbett, who declared that ‘the differences’ in pronunciation ‘are of very little real consequence . . . though the Scotch say coorn, the Londoners cawn, and the Hampshire folk carn, we all know they mean to say corn.’ Cobbett believed that the ...”

“... and she wanted to know why it was dry. I was miles away. I said I didn’t know. Aeroplane Glue Mr Ray stood behind me in History, waiting for me to make a slip. I had to write out the Kings and Queens of England, in reverse order, with dates. I put, ‘William I, 1087-1066’. I could smell the aeroplane glue on his fingers ...”

“... in New York as part of Walter Arensberg’s circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia, Varèse, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. She sketched Freud in Vienna and lived among the avant garde in postwar Berlin. In the Twenties, when American expatriates flocked to Paris, Loy was there too. In accounts of those ...”

“... out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three are, self-confessedly, dwarfed by the late Gordon Ray’s authoritative two-volume biography, Thackeray, The Uses of Adversity (1955) and Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom (1958). Not to labour the point, the story of Thackeray’s life (one of the great Victorian closed books) is no longer much of a mystery. Nor can ...”

“... Who was Max Perutz? There are plenty of good answers. He was an X-ray crystallographer, someone who uses X-rays as a tool to discover the three-dimensional structure of molecules. He was an accomplished skier and climber, with a sideline research interest in glaciology. He was a scientific manager, who founded and presided over Cambridge’s spectacularly successful Laboratory of Molecular Biology ...”

“... an emphasis on construction: not on the constructions of man, but rather, as the title of John Ray’s 1691 classic has it, on the Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation. This built on works by men such as John Wilkins and Robert Boyle, and was itself followed in the 18th century by strings of imitative treatises. In 1692 the Boyle Lectures were ...”

“... institutions. Miss Wolf’s particular interest is the post office. The Thought Girl (1920) by Ray Cummings    Guy Bates, since childhood, has been in telepathic rapport with a girl who lives in the Realm of Unthought Things. That world contains all the inventions that have not yet been invented in this world. When they are invented here, they disappear ...”

“... by the philosophers they attracted and the flowers and fruit they supplied to European princes. Ray Desmond describes how royal taste in the Age of Enlightenment led to the planting of a botanic garden at Kew. New to the British throne, the Hanoverians sought to create a version of the much imitated garden at Versailles. Queen Caroline chose the Tudor ...”

“... still in the family’s hands: the former is owned by Hunt family trusts; the latter is run by Ray Hunt, one of H.L. Hunt’s 14 children. The Hunt Oil Company is not a huge corporation, but it specialises in bringing off surprises. In the 1970s, Hunt acquired a North Sea field called Beatrice for $50,000; a few years later it was valued at $500 ...”