“... where Lakatos has moved centre stage. Readers who like gossip will not be disappointed. The staid may be appalled by the ribald tone of this little bit of Mitteleuropa am Aldwych. Two items in the book will be new to almost everyone. Both concern Lakatos. The first, which is already being talked about (I heard several corrupt versions before reading the ...”

“... You’ll remember this. You may not live there anymore, and it might be years since you’ve been there, but you’ll recognise it instantly. Nothing has changed. Not a thing out of place, and not a detail altered: same views, same problems, same people, same faces, same old same old. ‘I feel violent with "hate” against this bloody town ...”

“... he up and he jumped in the water-hole, Drowning himself by the coolibah tree, And his ghost may be heard as it sings by the billabong, Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me? ‘Waltzing Matilda’, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1895) Three weeks before the American presidential vote, the political right was victorious in the Australian federal ...”

“... person) as ‘indefinable … which he believes in a lively manner gives him ideas of whatever may be going forward externally’ – promoted in him ‘an almost irresistible inclination to visit different parts of his native country, in quest of knowledge or amusement’. At 26 he was not ready to pray away the rest of his life, to say nothing of ...”

“... with those of Queens or the Bronx) and hence its unequal distribution of resources. Manhattan may well be the world’s great cultural centre, yet few of the artists and intellectuals whose work animates it can afford to live there, and Bender says little about the effects of that. New Yorkers in search of cultural innovation are more likely to find it in ...”

“... have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history of philosophy as ...”

“... of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... and spoke of Wollstonecraft’s ‘imperfect heroism’, as Todd has it, she was annoyed; and when Richard Cobb’s review of that work subsequently appeared using the occasion to charge Wollstonecraft with silliness, egotism, envy, rancour, meddling, mediocrity and bad writing, she was furious. Describing these events a few years ago in Gender, Art and ...”

“... Aquitaine famously accompanied her first husband, Louis VII of France, on the Second Crusade and may have participated in negotiations between him and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Much later, as queen of England, she represented her son Richard I while he was on the Third Crusade. At a humbler rank, the Cistercian monk ...”

“... account over-subtle you will still grasp that its subject is a very different sort of person from Richard Hoggart, ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’ who at the Lady Chatterley trial succeeded, to the amazement and amusement of Our Age, in putting down ‘the Treasury counsel from Eton and Cambridge’. The single most irritating thing about this ...”

“... Italian opera and those of (dramatic) French opera (Herbert Josephs), and on French Wagnerism (Richard Sieburth). Ideal site that it is in which to register the mutual exchanges between art-forms, the theatre does conspicuously well throughout this History, where drama is seen no longer simply as a script but as a mutable event, evolving in its own richly ...”

“... these first and then turn to the biography’s particular merits. Before going further, it may be helpful if I make clear my own starting-point – that of someone who is neither a Lorca expert, a biographer nor a literary critic. My concern, as a historian and writer, has for long been with the interaction of the social and the subjective. Bear this ...”

“... of his eyes/ was totally written-off,/ he was harnessed to a retinagraph’, ‘So that, though it may seem somewhat improbable,/ all that follows/ flickers and flows/ from the back of his right eyeball.’ What takes the reader through the poem is pleasure and puzzlement in roughly equal measure. Whatever Muldoon is, he isn’t the maths master type of ...”

“... killers are deviant, while sunlight, death, panic and arthritis are natural. Whatever else they may be, human beings are natural material objects. Normality and convention can be on the side of enlightenment: if being allowed to go on strike isn’t normal, it ought to be; convention dictates that you shouldn’t kick vagrants who ask you for ...”