“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate ...”

“... It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’ The idea of the vamp extracting secrets from hapless men is old, but took on a ” new life during the First World War, when spy fever raged. Tammy ...”

“... have taken a little getting used to: He gave me his card. ‘The Venerable Thupten Ngodub’, it read, ‘Medium of the state oracle of Tibet’. There was a phone number, too. Thupten Ngodub was a young monk with a face of almost theatrical calm and a soft, deep voice. As well as being the medium of the state oracle, he was celebrated as a cartoonist: his ...”

“... well with his autobiography. Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004) is full of references to books he has read, and to writers and intellectuals who have influenced him. Hillary by contrast often practises the art of sinking in prose. Gerth and Van Natta accurately describe It Takes a Village (1996) as ‘designed to be hypoallergenic in every way’, while her ...”

“... man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of stubborn, bossy New England individualists. Even the Fuller family cow was ‘tyrannical’, Nathaniel Hawthorne once complained. (Hawthorne was a friend of Bucky’s ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”

“... jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently left the British army and, after a stint as the ...”

“... the category we have come to know, and take for granted, as ‘public opinion’. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man made Habermas’s argument more concrete and detailed: late 17th and 18th-century coffee houses ‘naturally were places where speech flourished’. When a man went into one, he paid an entrance fee of a penny, was told ...”

“... of the colleges couldn’t exist: without their work, as he says, ‘the hard readers could not read, nor the high thinkers live.’ He comes to recognise, in a word, that the origin of culture is labour. This is true etymologically as well. One of the original meanings of the word culture is the tending of natural growth, which is to say agriculture, and a ...”

“... Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t.     No answer: only the extreme hooded-eye treatment. Richard Avedon would need a studio’s worth of lights and reflectors to rig up this expression on an unsuspecting Salman. At the moment, though, a passing waiter with an Instamatic could have easily bettered it. Nobody spoke. Not even Christopher Hitchens. And I ...”

“... after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its ...”

“... with ways of making sense of the world around me.’ There were other formative influences. He read widely, and quickly absorbed the work of Léopold Senghor, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka, whose poetry drew on vernacular speech patterns and the rhythms of jazz and blues. Through New Beacon Books, a radical bookshop and publisher in ...”

“... and politics and marches were forbidden. I was 16, or 16 and a half, and still at school when I read in the papers that a black American, Jimmy Wilson, had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. I can still recall that moment of deep shock. We couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d stolen a million, executing him was a bit much. So I got a few ...”

“... interviewers, was ‘like opening a gate … the minute I opened it and saw the photographs, and read the text, I knew there was going to be yield from it.’Heaney had already been drawn to write boggy things. In the delightful poem ‘Bogland’ in Door into the Dark (1969) he had eulogised the preservative genius of the land: ‘Butter sunk under/More ...”

“... a sad and puzzled coda: ‘Forgive the zeal/That, too presumptuous, whisper’d better things/And read the book of destiny amiss.’ Anyhow, Priestley adored the poem, and read it to an admiring audience at the London Coffee House which included Boswell, on whose account of the struggle Barbauld had based her ...”