Britannica Quotes

You know what I need?” I asked. “A chocolate fountain?” Ethan suggested. “A complete paper set of the Encyclopedia Britannica? A lifetime supply of grilled meat?” “I like all those ideas, but I was thinking a magical spray I can use on Mallory to wash the crazy off her.” “Like Lysol for evil?” Paige asked.

philosophy I studied philosophy for four years. But I'd trade everything I learned for this passage... quoted in the Britannica: 'But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.' Amen.

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.

It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.

She wished Martin hadn't taken his Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when they split up. She missed that more than she missed him.

If the Britannica has taught me anything, it's to be more careful. I don't want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don't want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don't want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can't have "Jacobs" be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.

Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature.

Tool,” William said,...."As in a device to perform or facilitate mechanical or manual labor?” “That’s right Encyclopedia Britannica. Or in layman’s terms: screwdriver, hammer—” “How about a wrench,” William interrupted,“ — "You’ve got a quick learner on your hands, Bryn,” Paul said .... “Sure, wrench works just fine as well,” ... “Whatever blows your skirt up buddy.” ... “Well a wrench would come in handy right now,” William mused. “Because you definitely have a couple screws loose.

I promised myself that I would educate myself, and that I would never stop educating myself. It was my responsibility to keep learning. I would spend hours at the library on the weekends and read everything I could get my hands on. Books on dinosaurs. Books on history. I almost read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. And all for free. The reason I’m telling all of you this is that I want you to take this point to heart and make you understand that it’s your responsibility to educate yourself.

I’m aware of the stereotype many liberals have about conservative Catholics. The former believe the latter don’t think—that conservative religious people don’t care about facts and rigorous inquiry. But my conservative Catholic parents were thinkers. Twice as often as my parents told their four children to go wash, they told us to go look something up. At our suburban tract house on Long Island in the 1970s, our parents shelved the Encyclopædia Britannica right next to the dinner table so we could easily reach for a volume to settle the frequent debates. The rotating stack of periodicals in our kitchen included not only religiously oriented newsletters, but also the New York Times and National Geographic. Our parents took us to science museums, woke us up for lunar eclipses, and pushed us to question our textbooks and even our teachers when they sounded wrong.

And what do you have planned for your soiree?” Ethan asked. “I’m guessing it won’t involve tea sipping and heavy reading.” I pretended to adjust invisible glasses. “Well, we will be reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica aloud and watching Neil deGrasse Tyson videos on the YouTubes. We might also make time for macramé.

although we have our compendia of flora, fauna, birds, reptiles and insects, we lack a Terra Britannica, as it were: a gathering of terms for the land and its specificities

Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system.

Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were.

The influential 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes to the opposite extreme from the Encyclopédie: social history is buried within biography. So to read about the post-Roman world you must look up the entry on Attila the Hun.

In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: “He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.

Ecclesiastes This is a book of the Old Testament. I don't believe I've ever read this section of the Bible - I know my Genesis pretty well and my Ten Commandments (I like lists), but I'm hazy on a lot of the other parts. Here, the Britannica provides a handy Cliff Notes version of Ecclesiastes: [the author's] observations on life convinced him that 'the race is not swift, nor the battle strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all' (9:11). Man's fate, the author maintains, does not depend on righteous or wicked conduct but is an inscrutable mystery that remains hidden in God (9:1). All attempts to penetrate this mystery and thereby gain the wisdom necessary to secure one's fate are 'vanity' or futile. In the face of such uncertainty, the author's counsel is to enjoy the good things that God provides while one has them to enjoy. This is great. I've accumulated hundreds of facts in the last seven thousand pages, but i've been craving profundity and perspective. Yes, there was that Dyer poem, but that was just cynical. This is the real thing: the deepest paragraph I've read so far in the encyclopedia. Instant wisdom. It couldn't be more true: the race does not go to the swift. How else to explain the mouth-breathing cretins I knew in high school who now have multimillion-dollar salaries? How else to explain my brilliant friends who are stuck selling wheatgrass juice at health food stores? How else to explain Vin Diesel's show business career? Yes, life is desperately, insanely, absurdly unfair. But Ecclesiastes offers exactly the correct reaction to that fact. There's nothing to be done about it, so enjoy what you can. Take pleasure in the small things - like, for me, Julie's laugh, some nice onion dip, the insanely comfortable beat-up leather chair in our living room. I keep thinking about Ecclesiastes in the days that follow. What if this is the best the encyclopedia has to offer? What if I found the meaning of life on page 347 of the E volume? The Britannica is not a traditional book, so there's no reason why the big revelation should be at the end.

Published as a book with a standard-size font, it would contain just four letters . . . AGCTTGCAGGGG . . . and so on, stretching, inscrutably, page upon page, for over 1.5 million pages—sixty-six times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

One summer day when I was about ten, I sat on a stoop, chatting with a group of girls my age. We were all in pigtails and shorts and basically just killing time. What were we discussing? It could have been anything—school, our older brothers, an anthill on the ground. At one point, one of the girls, a second, third, or fourth cousin of mine, gave me a sideways look and said, just a touch hotly, “How come you talk like a white girl?” The question was pointed, meant as an insult or at least a challenge, but it also came from an earnest place. It held a kernel of something that was confusing for both of us. We seemed to be related but of two different worlds. “I don’t,” I said, looking scandalized that she’d even suggest it and mortified by the way the other girls were now staring at me. But I knew what she was getting at. There was no denying it, even if I just had. I did speak differently than some of my relatives, and so did Craig. Our parents had drilled into us the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin’ ” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t.” We were taught to finish off our words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopaedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, meticulously correcting our grammar or admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness—to inhabit it with pride—and this filtered down to how we spoke.

Wikipedia features a popular article called “Errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.” This article is, of course, always in flux. All Wikipedia is. At any moment the reader is catching a version of truth on the wing.

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family's life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in "taking care" of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn't and couldn't understand her.

An abstruse subject, I should conceive,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘Very, Sir,’ responded Pott, looking intensely sage. ‘He CRAMMED for it, to use a technical but expressive term; he read up for the subject, at my desire, in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.” ’ ‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I was not aware that that valuable work contained any information respecting Chinese metaphysics.’ ‘He read, Sir,’ rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr. Pickwick’s knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority —‘he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information, Sir!

Let knowledge grow from more to more and thus be human life enriched.

Dublin was an English city, one of the loveliest. The most Irish thing about it was the shifting drab flow of the poor people

Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the Encyclopaedia Britannica) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother's dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.

In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment focused attention on Glasgow and Edinburgh as centres of intellectual activity. The Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which originated in Glasgow in the early eighteenth century, and flourished in Edinburgh in the second half of the century. Its thinking was based on philosophical enquiry and its practical applications for the benefit of society ('improvement' was a favoured term). The Enlightenment encompassed literature, philosophy, science, education, and even geology. One of its lasting results was the founding of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-71). The effects of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially in the second half of the century, were far-reaching in Britain and Europe. The philosophical trends ranged from the 'common-sense' approach of Thomas Reid to the immensely influential works of David Hume, notably his Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739. Here, his arguments on God, and the cause and effect of man's relationship with God, are far ahead of their time in the philosophical debate in Britain: .... ... Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations (1776) was probably the most important work on economics of the century, revolutionising concepts of trade and prophesying the growing importance of America as 'one of the foremost nations of the world'. By a remarkable coincidence, the book was published in the very same year as the American Declaration of Independence.

The Book of Man (in Twenty-Three Volumes) It has 3,088,286,401 letters of DNA (give or take a few). Published as a book with a standard-size font, it would contain just four letters...AGCTTGCAGGGG...and so on, stretching, inscrutably, page upon page, for over 1.5 million pages-sixty-six times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It encodes about 20,687 genes in total-only 1,796 more than worms, 12,000 fewer than corn, and 25,000 fewer genes than rice or wheat. The difference between "human" and "breakfast cereal" is not a matter of gene numbers, but of the sophistication of gene networks. It is not what we have; it is how we use it.

Increasingly economic historians can draw analogies between the development of the present crisis and the period between the two world wars, as well as the crisis of a century ago, which was associated with the so-called great depression of 1873-1895. The latter crisis resulted in the rise of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, but also the end of Pax Britannica, as Britain began its decline from world leadership in the face of challenges from Germany and the United States. The present world crisis seems to be spelling the beginning of the end of Pax Americana and may hold untold other major readjustments in the international division of labor and world power in store for the future.

Our parents had drilled us under the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t “. We were taught to finish off words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, meticulously correcting our grammar and admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness – to inhabit it with pride – and this filtered down to how we spoke.

The information capacity recorded in DNA is of a size which astonishes scientists. There is enough information in a single human DNA molecule to fill a million encyclopedia pages or 1,000 volumes. To put it another way, the nucleus of a cell contains information, equivalent to that in a 1 million-page encyclopedia. It serves to control all the functions of the human body. To make a comparison, the 23-volume Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the largest encyclopedias in the world, contains a total of 25,000 pages. Yet a single molecule in the nucleus of a cell, and which is so much smaller than that cell, contains a store of information 40 times larger than the world's largest encyclopedias. That means that what we have here is a 1,000-volume encyclopedia, the like of which exists nowhere else on Earth. This is a miracle of design and creation within our very own bodies, for which evolutionists and materialists have no answer.

397] There are other cycles, of course, cycles within cycles -- and this is just that which creates such a difficulty in the calculations of racial events. The circuit of the ecliptic is completed in 25,868 years. And, with regard to our Earth, it is calculated that the equinoctial point falls back fifty minutes ten seconds, annually. But there is another cycle within this one. It is said that "as the apsis goes forward to meet it at the rate of eleven minutes twenty-four seconds, annually," (see the article on Astronomy in Encyclopaedia Britannica), "this would complete a revolution in one hundred and fifteen thousand three hundred and two years (115,302). The approximation of the equinox and the apsis is the sum of these motions, sixty-one minutes thirty-four seconds, and hence the equinox returns to the same position in relation to the apsis in 21,128 years." We have mentioned this cycle in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., in relation to other cycles. Each has a marked influence on its contemporary race. [398] See at the end of this Stanza

The incredible specified complexity of life becomes obvious when one considers the message found in the DNA of a one-celled amoeba (a creature so small, several hundred could be lined up in an inch). Staunch Darwinist Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is more than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica!2 In other words, if you were to spell out all of the A, T, C, and G in the unjustly called primitive amoeba (as Dawkins describes it), the letters would fill 1,000 complete sets of an encyclopedia! Now, we must emphasize that these 1,000 encyclopedias do not consist of random letters but of letters in a very specific orderjust like real encyclopedias. So heres the key question for Darwinists like Dawkins: if simple messages such as Take out the garbageMom, Mary loves Scott, and Drink Coke require an intelligent being, then why doesnt a message 1,000 encyclopedias long require one?

Both the European Union and the United States are in some sense the heirs of Rome. Like Rome, the United States is founded on a republican myth of liberation from a tyrannical oppressor. Just as the Rape of Lucretia led to the overthrow of the last Etruscan king, so the Boston Tea Party led to the overthrow of the British crown. The Founding Fathers of the United States sought quite literally to create a New Rome, with, for instance, a clear separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government—with the legislative branch called, as in Rome, the Senate. They even debated whether the executive branch would not be better represented, as in Rome, by two consuls rather than the president that they eventually settled for. The extended period of relative peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War has been dubbed the Pax Americana [‘American Peace’], after the Pax Romana which perdured from the accession of Augustus in 27 BCE to the death of the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, in 180 CE. The United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union can be accounted for, in part, by the ghost of the nineteenth century Pax Britannica, when the British Empire was not merely a province of Rome but a Rome unto herself.

...[T]hough the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman.

Nine hundred species of native plants. I have a feeling you’re someone who will appreciate that we grow the real beauties here,” Eudora said. “Not the gaudy sun perennials that want to flash everything they’ve got like cheap hookers. You have to look hard to find the pockets of beauty in my garden.” “Your garden?” But Eudora was no longer listening. She strode ahead, slowing down when they entered an intimate fairy-tale forest. The path narrowed and switched to pale stone. Crazy paving, Tom would have called it—stone slabs haphazardly slotted together in a way that defied time, feet, and the extremes of weather. The formal, structured sweep of the Historic Gardens was replaced by a hint of controlled but wild beauty. Above the towering hemlocks, the clouds broke apart to reveal slashes of blue sky. Eudora was right—so many pockets of beauty if you looked hard enough: trailing catkins and clusters of reddish pitcher plants that looked like rhubarb stalks with curling ends. (Such fascination he’d had for carnivorous plants after Tom had shown him a picture of a Venus flytrap in Encyclopædia Britannica.) A dead stick jutted up through the leaves; the sign next to it read “Northern Catalpa.” He would research that on the Web when he got to the office. See if he could find a picture of it in full leaf. “Here, smell this.” Eudora had stopped by a small, unimpressive tree, but as Felix moved close, he spotted tiny pom-poms of reddish blooms. He had never seen anything quite so weird or wonderful. Ella should definitely plant one of those. “Hmm.” “Witch hazel.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions. Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. Science resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He asked me innocently, what then had brought me to his home, and without a minutes hesitation I told him an astounding lie. A lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say. It's taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the city of Bayonne, this is it. I owe you a great deal, because after that lie I told you, I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by The Encyclopedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretenses, even if is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people and if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something, I will invite him in and say "Why are you doing this?" and if he says it is because he needs to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death, it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor in order to get the food he needs than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That's what I want to say, Mr John Doe.

In the Old Testament, the Egyptian ruler during the period of Prophet Ibrahim (as) and Prophet Yusuf (as) are named "Pharaoh." However, this title was actually employed after the eras in which these two prophets lived. While addressing the Egyptian ruler at the time of Prophet Yusuf (as), the word "Al-Malik" in Arabic is used in the Qur'an: It refers to a ruler, king or sultan: The King said, ‘Bring him to me straight away!'… (Qur'an, 12:50) The ruler of Egypt in the time of Prophet Musa (as) is referred to as "Pharaoh." This distinction in the Qur'an is not made in the Old and New Testaments nor by Jewish historians. In the Bible, the word "Pharaoh" is used, in every reference to an Egyptian monarch. On the other hand, the Qur'an is far more concise and accurate in the terminology it employs. The use of the word "Pharaoh" in Egyptian history belongs only to the late period. This particular title began to be employed in the 14th century B.C., during the reign of Amenhotep IV. Prophet Yusuf (as) lived at least 200 years before that time. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that the word "Pharaoh" was a title of respect used from the New Kingdom (beginning with the 18th dynasty; B.C. 1539-1292) until the 22nd dynasty (B.C. 945-730), after which this term of address became the title of the king. Further information on this Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an 291 subject comes from the Academic American Encyclopaedia, which states that the title of Pharaoh began to be used in the New Kingdom. As we have seen, the use of the word "Pharaoh" dates from a specific period in history. For that reason, the fact that the Qur'an distinguishes between the different Egyptian titles in different Egyptian eras is yet another proof that the Qur'an is Allah's word.

Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free?

Back in another untroubled summer, that of 1870, the British foreign secretary Lord Granville, gazing up from Whitehall, could detect “not a cloud in the sky.” Yet a month later, Europe would be torn asunder by the Franco-Prussian War, marking the end of a century of Pax Britannica and all its optimistic assumptions.

The origin of the Jews is revealed by the origin of their tribal name. The word "Jew" was unknown in ancient history. The Jews were then known as Hebrews, and the word Hebrew tells us all about this people that we need to know. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines Hebrew as originating in the Aramaic word, Ibhray, but strangely enough, offers no indication as to what the word means. Most references, such as Webster's International Dictionary, 1952, give the accepted definition of Hebrew. Webster says Hebrew derives from the Aramaic Ebri, which in turn 19 derives from the Hebrew word, Ibhri, lit. "one who is from across the river. 1. A Member of one of a group of tribes in the northern branch of the Semites, including Israelites." That is plain enough. Hebrew means "one who is from across the river." Rivers were often the boundaries of ancient nations, and one from across the river meant, simply, an alien. In every country of the ancient world, the Hebrews were known as aliens. The word also, in popular usage, meant "one who should not be trusted until he has identified himself." Hebrew in all ancient literature was written as "Habiru". This word appears frequently in the Bible and in Egyptian literature. In the Bible, Habiru is used interchangeably with "sa-gaz", meaning "cutthroat". In all of Egyptian literature, wherever the word Habiru appears, it is written with the word "sa-gaz" written beside it. Thus the Egyptians always wrote of the Jews as "the cutthroat bandits from across the river". For five thousand years, the Egyptian scribes identified the Jews in this manner. Significantly, they are not referred to except by these two characters. The great Egyptian scholar, C. J. Gadd, noted in his book, The Fall of Nineveh, London, 1923, "Habiru is written with an ideogram. . . sa-gaz. . . signifying 'cut-throats'." In the Bible, wherever the word Habiru, meaning the Hebrews, appears, it is used to mean bandit or cutthroat. Thus, in Isaiah 1:23, "Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves," the word for thieves here is Habiru. Proverbs XXVIII:24 , "Whoso robbeth his father or his mother, and saith, 'It is no transgression; the same is the companion of a destroyer," sa-gaz is used here for destroyer, but the word destroyer also appears sometimes in the Bible as Habiru. Hosea VI:9 , "And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent; for they commit lewdness." The word for robbers in this verse is Habiru.

Natalie’s house, not least because of the seventeen-inch Zenith, inside a pale wood cabinet, the biggest television Miri had ever seen. Her grandmother had a set but it was small with rabbit ears and sometimes the picture was snowy. The furniture in the Osners’ den all matched, the beige sofas and club chairs arranged around a Danish modern coffee table, with its neat stacks of magazines—Life, Look, Scientific American, National Geographic. A cloth bag with a wood handle, holding Mrs. Osner’s latest needlepoint project, sat on one of the chairs. A complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica took up three shelves of the bookcase, along with family photos, including one of Natalie at summer camp, in jodhpurs, atop a sleek black horse, holding her ribbons, and another of her little sister, Fern, perched on a pony. In one corner of the room was a game table with a chess set standing ready, not that she and Natalie knew how to play, but Natalie’s older brother, Steve, did and sometimes he and Dr. Osner would play for hours.

Quella era una fine d’anno speciale, dopotutto, e le speranze e i timori per il futuro di ognuno sembravano affiorare in quei pochi minuti che precedevano l’arrivo del nuovo secolo. Tenendosi per mano, gli ospiti si disposero a cerchio, pronti a intonare le dolci note di Auld Lang Syne, I bei tempi andati, come voleva un’antica tradizione britannica diffusasi anche nel Nuovo Mondo. Le spalle all’ingresso del salone, come gli altri emozionata e incerta per il domani, Camille prese posto tra i Campbell. «Sarà un fantastico secolo il 1900, Camille, e tu lo percorrerai a testa alta, mia cara» le disse Agnes sorridendole. «Due minuti, signori, due minuti!» urlò il giudice Harris. Le voci si alzarono festose, per poi morire di nuovo. Il grande cerchio era ora immobile, in silenziosa attesa. Anche i camerieri avevano interrotto il loro lavoro e l’orchestra taceva. «Trenta secondi al nuovo secolo!» «Venti secondi!» Camille all’improvviso sentì la testa girarle e il cuore battere impetuoso contro il petto: Mr Campbell, alla sua destra, aveva lasciato che un’altra mano, più forte e più grande, stringesse la sua. Non capiva di chi fosse quella mano, perché Agnes sorridesse, perché tutti, in quel cerchio festoso, la guardassero. O meglio, lo capiva perfettamente ma temeva che se si fosse girata, se avesse guardato l’uomo che aveva preso il posto di Mr Campbell nel cerchio, quel sogno si sarebbe interrotto. «Cinque secondi al nuovo secolo!» sentenziò il giudice Harris. «Quattro, tre, due, uno! Buon anno!» esclamarono tutti, all’unisono. L’orchestra intonò le prime battute di Auld Lang Syne e gli ospiti incominciarono a cantare. Camille si girò con lentezza infinita verso l’uomo che stringeva con forza e dolcezza e speranza la sua mano. L’uomo che la stava guardando sorridente, felice come un ragazzino. Era fradicio e aveva gli occhi lucidi. E cantava. Camille non disse nulla e si unì al coro, mentre lacrime di gioia le scivolavano sul viso. *** Quando la musica terminò il cerchio non si ruppe subito. Tutti rimasero immobili a osservare la scena che si svolgeva davanti a loro. Frank Raleigh, il solito anticonformista, gocciolante e vestito come un mandriano, se ne stava in ginocchio davanti a Miss Brontee con in mano un solitario dalle notevoli dimensioni. Nessuno ebbe dubbi su cosa le stesse chiedendo. Miss Brontee lo fissava a bocca aperta, gli occhi tondi di sorpresa, il petto che si alzava e si abbassava troppo in fretta, il volto pallido. «Allora, Miss Brontee, dite di sì a quel poveretto prima che si prenda una polmonite!» esclamò burbera un’anziana signora, rompendo la tensione di quel momento. Tutti scoppiarono a ridere. «Sì, Miss Brontee, ditegli di sì. Almeno metterà la testa a posto!» «Ti prego, Camille, dimmi di sì» implorò Frank in un sussurro. Camille deglutì, si guardò intorno come per chiedere consiglio ai presenti, incontrò lo sguardo di Agnes e di Mr Campbell, che insieme assentirono. Poi guardò Raleigh e semplicemente rispose: «Sì!» La sala esplose in una girandola di congratulazioni, poi altro champagne fu stappato e i brindisi al nuovo secolo e ai promessi sposi si rincorsero. Mr Raleigh, indifferente al centinaio di persone che li stava fissando, si era intanto rialzato e tenendo Miss Brontee stretta tra le braccia le mormorava parole che tutti i presenti avrebbero voluto udire ma che giunsero solo al cuore di Camille.

God and the Soldier all men adore, In time of trouble and no more, For when war is over And all thing righted, God is neglected, And the Old Soldier slighted.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

In addition to their vast library of music, children with smartphones today have access to more information in real time via the mobile web than the president of the United States had twenty years ago. Wikipedia alone claims to have over fifty times as much information as Encyclopaedia Britannica, the premier compilation of knowledge for most of the twentieth century.3 Like Wikipedia but unlike Britannica, much of the information and entertainment available today is free, as are over one million apps on smartphones.4

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant. I had already used it in three books as the name of an imaginary town when I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the ceiba, that it produces no flowers or fruit, and that its light, porous wood is used for making canoes and carving cooking implements. Later, I discovered in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that in Tanganyika there is a nomadic people called the Makonde, and I thought this might be the origin of the word. But I never confirmed it, and I never saw the tree, for though I often asked about it in the banana region, no one could tell me anything about it. Perhaps it never existed.

Allen Dulles even infiltrated that paragon of objectivity the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whitewashing the agency’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in an article in the 1963 Book of the Year.63

In fact, a study published in the scientific journal Nature revealed that a typical article in Wikipedia was almost as accurate as a typical article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 33

Do not call anyone "mate" unless you have served on a boat with them.

As Wikipedia showed, loosely organized communities of individuals could substitute for entire businesses. After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica finally ended its print edition in 2012, while Microsoft closed Encarta completely in 2009. Decentralized networks of autonomous individuals who existed outside the bounds of any single organization have taken over many productive activities that used to occur within a single, hierarchically organized company. In effect, individuals became competitors to many large linear businesses rather than just their customers. For example, YouTube and other online video-streaming platforms that depended on user-generated content started to compete for advertising dollars with professionally created content broadcast by television networks and cable companies

Stephen Colbert called “truthiness” in the first episode of The Colbert Report. “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?” his character asked. “If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart . . . Face it, folks, we are a divided nation . . . divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart . . . Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.

At one point, I ran out of books to read at the school library and the neighborhood library,” Musk said. “This is maybe the third or fourth grade. I tried to convince the librarian to order books for me. So then, I started to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That was so helpful. You don’t know what you don’t know. You realize there are all these things out there.” Elon, in fact, churned through two sets of encyclopedias—a feat that did little to help him make friends. The boy had a photographic memory, and the encyclopedias turned him into a fact factory. He came off as a classic know-it-all. At the dinner table, Tosca would wonder aloud about the distance from Earth to the Moon. Elon would spit out the exact measurement at perigee and apogee. “If we had a question, Tosca would always say, ‘Just ask genius boy,’” Maye said. “We could ask him about anything. He just remembered it.” Elon cemented his bookworm reputation through his clumsy ways. “He’s not very sporty,” said Maye.

He’d never known a world where phones were tethered to the wall and you had to look up facts in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He was born a Victorian, and traces of ‘Victorian values’ remained with him throughout. He had a strong inherited sense of duty, even though, like Sidgwick, he found it difficult to justify it philosophically. He believed in government by a benevolent clerisy, or intellectual aristocracy. There was in this notion a mingling of the social and intellectual which reflects the very Victorian rise of Keynes’s own family, through brains and business acumen, into the circle of the governing class. He was a ‘thinking’ patriot, though his patriotism was free of any trace of jingoism. He was a firm believer in the virtues of the Pax Britannica and reluctant to believe that any other country could take on Britain’s world role. He was pro-German, anti-French -another 19th-century inheritance.

The Napoleonic Wars and the New World Order that Followed (1803–1815) The Napoleonic Wars lasted from 1803 to 1815, when Great Britain and its allies defeated Napoleon and his allies. As is usual, the victors got together to create a new world order, which was hashed out at the Congress of Vienna. It drew new boundaries to ensure that no European power would become too dominant, based on balance of power concepts that would avoid war. The British emerged as the world’s leading empire, and as is typical after the war and the establishment of a new order, there was an extended period of peace and prosperity—the Pax Britannica. Western Powers Move into Asia (1800S) The British and other Western powers brought their gunboats to India, China, and Japan in the mid-1700s and into the 1800s, causing dramatic disruptions to the course of their histories. At the time, both China and Japan were isolationist.

As a teenager I saved up for years from the earnings of my paper route to buy a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica for several thousand dollars, and that counted for thousands of dollars of GDP. By contrast, a teenager today with a smartphone has access to a vastly superior encyclopedia in Wikipedia—one that counts for nothing in economic activity because it’s free.

As Sutherland writes: “In the 18th century, Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known, became France’s wealthiest overseas colony, largely because of its production of sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force” (Sutherland, 2007). There were three general groups of African descent: those who were free (est. 30,000 in 1789), half mixed-race and identified as mulatto, who were quite wealthy; those who were enslaved (close to 500,000 people); and those who had run away (called Maroons) who had retreated deep into the mountains and lived off subsistence farming. Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint-Domingue slavery, there were rebellions before 1791. As Carroll writes: “One plot even involved the poisoning of masters” (Carroll, n.d.; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Sutherland notes that “the Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful … rebellion [and revolution] in the Western Hemisphere.

Americans - who were a real beneficiary of the British world stabilization, or empire - never quite understood its beneficial nature as far as the Atlantic world was concerned, at least not until it had begun to disappear. When British power cracked, the British Peace ended. Around the world, dozens of areas that had been ruled or overwhelmed by British power and influence would return to the instability, disruption, and petty wars they had known previously. Only now, this instability offered opportunities for Soviet influence.

Vyshinsky showed the new Soviet ploy: to obscure Russian expansion and Russian tyranny by direct and repeated reminders of former Western imperialism and the Pax Britannica, of which the West had grown ashamed.

Ben is awesome.

He tells me that dealing with ancient DNA “is like taking the entire collection of Encyclopedia Britannica, ripping it up into two-letter pieces, scrambling it all up, and then having some grad student put it back together without coffee.

My dress falls prettily over the middle of us, but that wouldn’t stop anyone walking by from realizing what the two of us are doing. With Jackson’s clothes scattered around us and my panties on the floor, it’s clear we aren’t reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In both Nelson’s Perpetual Loose Leaf Encyclopaedia4 and Britannica, dragons were officially declared unreal creatures in their entries under “dragon.” Britannica states: Nor were these dragons anything but very real terrors, even in the imaginations of the learned until comparatively modern times. As the waste places were cleared, indeed, they withdrew farther from the haunts of men, and in Europe their last lurking-places were the inaccessible heights of the Alps, where they lingered till Jacques Balmain set the fashion which has finally relegated them to the realm of myth.

A selection of quotes from The Night of Harrison Monk’s Death (Jane Hetherington's Adventures in Detection: 1) "Is this one of the more unusual cases of safe-breaking you've been asked to investigate, Mrs Hetherington?" "Remember your private detective wants to be able to sleep soundly at night and in their own bed, not one supplied as her Majesty's pleasure." "It seems to be an open and shut case doesn't it? But it's not you know? How do you know if anything is what it seems?" "But where is Cheung kin?" "When I first set eyes on your father, he was spying on a man from between two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica." "I don't think I need say more." "On the contrary, if you want me to have any idea what you're talking about, I think you do." "Why don't you report it to the police?" "Because I stole it in the first place didn't I?" "It's something of a mystery, I admit." "Vanished into thin air!" "You sound so sensible Mrs Hetherington. Please help us get to the bottom of this." Ah, thought Jane – the old story. "No body was found?" "Shall I put the kettle on?" "Only if you fill it with whiskey." "The course of true love didn't run smoothly for me either, you know." "Life has its tragedies for sure." "… What do I want? I want money that's what I want. I want money." She was even more horrified by the words she heard next. Callum MacCallum knew what it was like to be an outsider.

Old, Middle, and New or Modern English.

It was this hierarchy—so central to Western cosmology for so long that, even today, a ten-year-old could intuitively get much of it right—that was challenged by the most famous compendium of all: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s eighteen-thousand-page Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was sponsored by neither the Catholic Church nor the French monarchy and was covertly hostile to both. It was intended to secularize as well as to popularize knowledge, and it demonstrated those Enlightenment commitments most radically through its organizational scheme. Rather than being structured, as it were, God-down, with the whole world flowing forth from a divine creator, it was structured human-out, with the world divided according to the different ways in which the mind engages with it: “memory,” “reason,” and “imagination,” or what we might today call history, science and philosophy, and the arts. Like alphabetical order, which effectively democratizes topics by abolishing distinctions based on power and precedent in favor of subjecting them all to the same rule, this new structure had the effect of humbling even the most exalted subjects. In producing the Encyclopédie, Diderot did not look up to the heavens but out toward the future; his goal, he wrote, was “that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier.” It is to Diderot’s Encyclopédie that we owe every modern one, from the Britannica and the World Book to Encarta and Wikipedia. But we also owe to it many other kinds of projects designed to, in his words, “assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” It introduced not only new ways to do so but new reasons—chief among them, the diffusion of information prized by an élite class into the culture at large. The Encyclopédie was both the cause and the effect of a profoundly Enlightenment conviction: that, for books about everything, the best possible audience was the Everyman.

В юности вместе с учившимися в университете друзьями он проштудировал основы языкознания по классической «Философии грамматики [Linguistica]» Йенса Есперсена, занимался историей философии, европейской и восточной, много читал по пушкинской эпохе, пользуясь, в частности, профессиональной библиотекой покойного пушкиниста Б. В. Томашевского. Всю жизнь он не расставался с лучшей из всех российских энциклопедий, «Энциклопедическим словарем» издательства Брокгауза и Ефрона, к которой в Америке прибавилась «Encyclopedia Britannica». Судя по всему, он особенно внимательно читал в «Брокгаузе» замечательные статьи В. С. Соловьева по истории философии и религии.

The Holy Bible. Encyclopedia Britannica. Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, otherwise known as the First Folio.

Buck Powell’s Britannica and Bill Gates’s Encarta were worlds apart in terms of technology—one old and analog and the other new and digital. But in one key aspect they were identical: their perspective. They were committed to the Pyramid mindset. Experts decided and assigned, locking in power at the top with predictable results.

When Jimmy Wales launched Nupedia he recognized what had been lost in the fight to win encyclopedias. He sought to revive something like the original Britannica but enabled by instant communication and low-cost digital publishing. Yet Jimmy and his team still placed themselves at the top of the system, making it dependent on them and their process. His caution had made him a gatekeeper. His rigorous filtering and fact-checking system blocked all the energy. The implied message was that Nupedia was Jimmy’s platform, not everyone’s. Despite its newfangled technology, Nupedia was still a Pyramid.

Well, Mr. Britannica, do you mind telling me how an extinct bird that can’t fly is flying around being…not extinct?

But emotion, for most people, too often is like some sort of slumbering giant, lulled to sleep by preoccupation with the dead facts of that outer world we call objective. When we look at a painting, we see a price tag. A trip is logistics more than pleasure. Romance dies in household routine. Yet life without feeling is a sort of death. Most of us know this. So, we long wistfully for speeded heartbeat, sharpened senses, brighter colors. This search for feeling is what turns your reader to fiction; the reason why he reads your story. He seeks a reawakening: heightened pulse; richer awareness. Facts are the least of his concern. For them, he can always go to the World Almanac or Encyclopedia Britannica.

Uno su quattro dei terroristi stranieri assoldati dall’Isis è di origine britannica.

Since the late 20th century, a growing number of scholars have rejected both the Aryan invasion hypothesis and the use of the term Aryan as a racial designation, suggesting that the Sanskrit term arya (“noble” or “distinguished”), the linguistic root of the word, was actually a social rather than an ethnic epithet.

England acted to maintain the “Pax Britannica” in British colonies, and global stability in British areas of influence. Under the leadership of Conservative leaders such as Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, the British Empire adopted a foreign policy known as the “Splendid Isolation.” This policy sought to maintain the global balance of power while limiting the need for any sort of British intervention in other powers’ internal affairs along with any alliance that would demand a British intervention.

The family was serious about education; after dinner, Fred was known to issue volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to his children and guests for a little light reading.

Thanks to the work of Laird Scranton and his gracious exchange of information with his audience online, I was able -with the help of Veronique Smith- to embark upon an insight in the Dogon culture that I honestly wasn't expecting to acquire at all. In the Dogon tradition -according to Laird Scranton- a potential interface between the non-material and material worlds could be established in various ways and even probably through a non-human agent. When I projected that framework onto Islam, I reasoned that if the non-human entity were not a messenger of God and rather a being from among the Jinn, then the communication which the Dogon priests were seeking must have been satanic in nature based on the fact that the word 'satan' means in the Semitic tongue 'to diverge' - and that is exactly the effect that takes place once man seeks contact with these beings. However, I know -based on my own work- that the contrary social concept to 'divergence' is 'Umma/Ummah' and -after listening to the latest audio interview of Laird Scranton talking about Skara Brae- I heard him mention the word 'Amma' which refers to the divine in the Dogon religion and as a consequence thereof, I directly linked it with 'Umma'. This sparked my attention to realize that such a communication could have not been demonic in nature and rather didactic in purpose. But I needed a proof for it; and when I further searched for more information I found an article on Britannica -which I discovered that Laird Scranton has written it himself- mentioning the word 'Amazigb' - this word [was applied collectively to the hunter cultural groups who preceded the 1st dynasty in ancient Egypt]. The evidence was lying there in front of my eyes in that word and more specifically in the syllable 'zigb' which could have been construed from 'gizb' meaning to 'attract' or 'get together' in contrast to 'divergence'. I also discovered that there is a cultural resemblance between the Dogon and the Berber in that Berbers have the name 'Amazigh' which is derived from the name of the ancestor 'Mezeg'; this name literally means 'to mix' and 'to put together'. Laird Scranton even links 'Amma' to 'Amen', and now I don't see any other choice for me in the time being but to accept 'Amen' as a word that refers to the act of 'bringing together'.

The companion didn’t so much have hair as bristles. It looked as if someone had planted iron filings in his scalp to see what would grow and you could have sanded oak with his jaw. From his posture, it appeared that his thighs were too thick with muscle to allow his knees to do anything but wave to each other from a distance. He did not look as if he would know what do with a polite conversation if it was handed to him on a golden platter. Harmon, Paula. Murder Britannica: Just when you thought it was safe to go for a nice bath . January Press. Kindle Edition.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines eugenics as “the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity.” Yet most people draw a blank when they hear the word, or else it conjures up images of swastikas and jack‑booted Nazis. Contrary to this warped image, eugenics has had a long history, extending back to ancient Rome and beyond.

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Syntopicon, which sets forth “The 102 Great Ideas of Western Man

to find a bear and try their best to convert them to join their respective religions. Later they gather to discuss their experiences. The priest begins: “I found the bear, read to him from the catechism, and blessed him with holy water. He’s having his first communion next week”. The minister then said, “The bear I found was so mesmerized by my teaching of the Holy Word that he let me baptize him then and there.” The priest and the minister looked at the Rabbi expectantly. He had bruises and blood in his clothes, “In hindsight, I shouldn’t have begun with the circumcision.” Book Advertisement “Encyclopaedia Britannica for Sale Complete set

A good reference book, the Columbia Encyclopedia. Best one-volume all-round reference in the world and more useful than the Britannica, even if it does waste an entry on Isaac Asimov." "On whom?" asked Gonzalo. "Asimov. Friend of mine. Science fiction writer and pathologically conceited. He carries a copy of the Encyclopedia to parties and says, 'Talking of concrete, the Columbia Encyclopedia has an excellent article on it only 249 pages after their article on me. Let me show you.' Then he shows them the article on himself.

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there’s this couple lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don’t they?