A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high s...
How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?
I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.
In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
My first popular book, 'A Brief History of Time,' aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.
Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason a...
The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantas...
These books can't possibly compete with centuries of established history, especially when that history is endorsed by the ultimate bestseller of all time." Faukman's eyes went wide. "Don't tell me Harry Potter is actually about the Holy Grail." "I wa...
When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. Ther...
Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.
In my view, the gospels are true, not historically, but theologically, or, as I would argue, prophetically! What we have is, the Messiah’s history written in advance in story form.
We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.
Make yourself interesting to history. Master some aspect of life, and then find a different area and do something crazy. Become a painter, then round up a herd of cattle and slaughter them with your bare hands. Then collect their blood and paint a mu...
I didn’t do it in 1066. But I’m only not guilty because I wasn’t quite alive then. The ferocity of the Normans not named Norman is underestimated in history, and I fear neither woman nor man. But one thing that does terrify me is hermaphrodites...
A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly...
Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.
I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.
He could have made it right with the book. But he hasn't. He is a revisionist of history. He has lied.
