“... much, partly through not having been brought up to it but also having had a duodenal ulcer as a young man, I suppose I feel disqualified, or somehow got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s ...”

“... rid of the boiled oatmeal consistency of the bad verse of 1900, and there is no doubt that many young readers seeing Binyon’s inversions etc, will be likely to throw down the translation under the impression that it is incompetent.’ But this, he said, was to be short-sighted. ‘The fact that this idiom, which was never spoken on sea or land, is NOT fit ...”

“... civilian property, but not to overdo it. Rather than enforceability, the law appeals to what Michael Ignatieff aptly calls ‘the warrior’s honour’. The British Government’s accession to the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions illustrates the negotiated pragmatism of the laws of war. The Protocols were finalised in 1977, but it was only ...”

“... our tried institutions with an openness to change when practical considerations prompted – what Michael Oakeshott later called ‘intimations’. The trouble is that Burke himself, like many other conservatives, tended in practice not to recognise such intimations. Nothing could have been more obvious than that rotten boroughs ought to be abolished and the ...”

“... of the world’s crimes, but has always felt compelled to make his voice heard. When he was young and first realised he was gay, he had to sing dumb, of course. Later, he began training for the priesthood, but when the silence about sexuality continued, he refused to accept the pretence and left. MacCulloch doesn’t exactly go in for howling, but he is ...”

“... and suffering from the previous night’s exploits take over the narration in the staccato of young adult fiction (‘Legend night. But OMG that taxi driver. Creepy.’) A few paragraphs later, we’re with Margaret Rose and Jane, on the hunt for a miracle cure for the fast-declining Shane. They consider ‘a drop of blessed oil of St Thérèse of Lisieux ...”

“... in his village for worthless things; Virginia Woolf’s ‘Solid Objects’, in which a young man gives up a promising parliamentary career so he can walk around London in search of beautiful shards of pottery) and printed off academic articles in which psychiatrists argued over definitions. For months, the books and papers kept accumulating. I’d ...”

“... The estate was sold ... great changes have been wrought/In all the neighbourhood’: the end of ‘Michael’, we are told, expresses an English experience ‘in danger of being not merely exploited but exterminated’. Massacres again! And it didn’t happen. The English genius – or so we used to be told – is for compromise: and over issues like dialects ...”

“... radicals attempted to bridge the gap. Something like an ‘indigenous’ movement sprang up as young intellectuals came increasingly to understand the importance of Peru’s cultural duality. José Carlos Mariategui, who in 1930 founded the Socialist Party and whose thought has been an important influence on Sendero, mixed his highly theoretical Marxism ...”

“... She took blood samples from all of them back to America for analysis of their DNA and found a young scientist, James Gusella, who was eager to search for the gene, even though the chances of finding it seemed remote. Against all odds, however, he and his collaborators succeeded in locating it on one specific human chromosome, although no one has yet been ...”

“... de Man toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a ...”

“... an adventure. I go into Stratford to look at the Swan, the new RSC auditorium. Its architect, Michael Reardon, has done a stunning job – almost literally, since the steep concentrated space feels physically violent. People talk about Blackfriars as its model, but Reardon says that when invited to fit a structure inside the old rehearsal rooms, he ...”

“... Swales; and the draft notes were prepared for the simultaneous German edition of the letters by Michael Schröter. Masson’s contribution was evidently to polish and edit the translation and to contribute those limited notes which he considered necessary for English-language readers. Rather than informing the reader, he often uses the footnotes – and ...”

“... important, in a quite different way, for many Tory MPs. Clegg’s immediately hostile reaction to Michael Gove’s suggestion that O-levels could be restored for brainy children but not for the rest is another instance. Gove, despite what he says, is a social reactionary; Clegg is not. Cameron’s recent musings on the desirability of further welfare cuts ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”