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“... the averagely hopeful traveller will be looking for: the everlastingly incomprehensible has the ring of a turn-off, not of an attraction. Segalen may have here had in mind only the initial shock of the exotic, however: that first sense of alienation for which the French have just the right word, dépaysement. For all his medical education, once he began to ...”

“... lullabies. As you would expect, the voice is tuneful and there is often an intelligent, estranged ring to what he writes. His book hovers over the hills and waterways of Scotland, staring down at the rutted marks of former glaciers and the footprints of deer, but all the while there are questions whispered under his breath: do I belong here? Is Scotland ...”

“... of Mehmet the Conqueror, who overthrew Byzantium but set up Greek and Armenian patriarchates, with Christian behaviour in Spain: ‘You drove out the Muslims, who had made their homes there, into the sea by the thousands and burned them at the stake.’ Back in the shadow of Musa Dagh, Gabriel discovers a secret cache of rifles in the graveyard and works out a ...”

“... not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem of determinism/freedom. Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapir’s ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life by an insurance company ...”

“... to become a better place. In this self-critical mode, a historical contrast is often drawn. Christian Europe was for centuries disfigured by savage religious intolerance, by every kind of persecution, inquisition, expulsion, pogrom resorted to in the attempt to stamp out other communities of faith, Jewish or Muslim, not to speak of heretics within the ...”

“... down with the cones of our retinas. I looked up ‘darkness’ on the Web – and was offered Christian ministries offering to lead me to salvation. And there is always death. We say death is darkness, and darkness death. In Aberdeen, although it was not yet five o’clock, the harbour lights were lit against the night sky. Ships were berthed right up ...”

“... by water and a departure by water frame the plots of The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin. The Ring saga begins literally in the water, below the river Rhine’s surface (to end, four operas later, with a cosmic duet of water and fire). Wagner’s most delirious exploration of fluidity, Tristan and Isolde, begins and ends with journeys over water. Act One ...”

“... and Dooey, is known as the Scratchings and is the site of a vanished settlement of the early Christian era. As a child in the Fifties I’d go out with friends and find horses’ teeth, packed oyster, mussel and clam shells, then sometimes bronze and iron pins, bits of ancient Celtic jewellery. One hot afternoon I uncovered a charred piece of wood with ...”

“... he calls them ‘innovative’, or advocates of ‘political experimentation’, but the phrases ring anachronistically when applied to a period when proponents of change congratulated themselves on looking backward. Norbrook himself shows that his radical tradition, at least after the mid-16th century, was not dedicated to social amelioration or ...”

“... response to the conflict. Roland and Vera had become unofficially engaged (Vera refused to wear a ring) while he was on leave in August that year: they had both evidently decided that this was to be the next step in their relationship and went ahead despite the fact that their meetings were distinguished by an inability to recapture the intimacy of their ...”

“... these pages included the 1866 Poems and Ballads, whose necrophiliac, sadomasochistic and anti-Christian sentiments provoked such outrage in the press that his publisher was frightened into withdrawing the book, this was a defiant statement. But Swinburne liked defiance. He had ignored the pleas of his friends to moderate the poems before they were ...”

“... the gold coinage of the European humanistic tradition; the magnificent florins of humanism will ring once again, not against the archaeologist’s spade, but ... like the jingling coins of common currency passing from hand to hand. It may only be a chance of translation that the coin of Mandelstam’s hope is the Florentine one, the currency of Dante’s ...”

“... of the fatedness to irony, but then, as Cavell says, ‘Wittgenstein’s audience is not the Christian inoculated against Christianity.’ Cavell writes not primarily to produce new theses or conclusions, nor to produce new arguments to old conclusions, but, as Kierkegaard and the later Wittgenstein did, to excavate and transform the reader’s ...”

“... invented – the Four O’Clock in the Morning Club, whose insomniac members were entitled to ring each other up at that lonely hour. These healing conversations might largely consist of warnings about an imminent New Moon, for they shared a fanatic belief in the danger of glimpsing such a phenomenon through intervening glass. (Spectacles, and on occasion ...”

“... but just as the Sufis challenged Sharia Islam, Vaishnavites the Vedic ritualists, or Christian mystics the authority of the pope, this move threatens the guardians and interpreters of scripture. In Ge’s account, Zhu Xi is a cantankerous, embattled figure, far from the plaster saint he later became, vigorously defending engagement with the world ...”