Meri, who had been a "wild girl," a "bad girl" in high school, seems to have been drawn to her husband, Nathan, because he represented safety and respectability and possessed "what Meri has come to think of as credentials: a distinguished, or at least a solidly reputable, academic for a father — long deceased — a mother who has a silver tea service, inherited from her parents".
David Lodge's three solidly crafted comic novels of academic life, compiled here in one volume, are all set in the fictional University of Rummidge, a rain-lashed, new-built institution in the Midlands.
To the rest of the world, the priorities of U.S. authorities in shutting down a company based solidly on science and largely academic discoveries are hard to fathom.
"He's solidly grounded, not an ivory-tower academic.
America's academic establishment is so solidly liberal that Naderites easily outnumber Republicans.
Whilst Kant eked out a living as a private tutor for years before success was forthcoming, his perspective is also solidly situated within the steady parade of academic and social luminaries who came to see him in Königsberg.
The stronger academic students studied together in honors classes, more solidly white (and Jewish because Jamaica's zoned catchment area was overwhelmingly Jewish) than the school at large.
He wrestles not only with their disapproval but with his own inconvenient knowledge that his graduate school is "solidly second-tier," turning out lowly composition teachers rather than academic stars.
Rebecca Stott, whose previous books include a vivid biographical study of Charles Darwin called "Darwin and the Barnacle," is perfectly at home in academic scholarship, and her 17th-century characters and settings are solidly grounded in fact.
