“... other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes paragraphs and believes in calling a bastard a bastard. Inevitably, such an exhaustive work of reference answers questions nobody is ever likely to ask. As you leaf through the 6000 double-columned pages you are sometimes overwhelmed by ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without ...”

“... but there’s no indication that that is an informed opinion. Has he read (for example) David Marr’s Vision (1982)? Has he heard that there are honest-to-God theorems about the inference from one-dimensional retinal representations to representations of two-dimensional form; and from representations of two-dimensional form (and motion) to ...”

“... to each successive generation in Scotland. On the day, however, it provoked hilarity, and Patrick Hume of Marchmont’s equally famous one-line put-down: ‘Behold he dreamed, but lo! when he awoke, he found it was a dream.’ In truth the short-range advantages turned out to be themselves disconcertingly far off. As Scott put it sourly, after Union was ...”

“... groundbreaking experiments were undertaken by Nikos Logothetis, working with Jeffrey Schall and David Leopold. It had been known since the 19th century that if quite different images are shown to each of your eyes at the same time, your conscious experience doesn’t blend the two but flips between them. If one of your eyes is shown a face and the other is ...”

“... of political theorists in the background – Hobbes, Locke (a Royal Africa Company shareholder), Hume, Rousseau – and has interesting things to say about them all. How far their doctrines are really relevant to Paine is queried in another recent book, by David Wilson, and it may be safer to look to the general tradition ...”

“... which have to be read in a new way. These are President Mary Robinson, Provisional Sinn Fein, John Hume and the British Government. The ‘not’ factor does not help us to read Mary Robinson. She is a political idealist, and saying the opposite of what she means would not appeal to her. This does not mean that she says exactly what she means. She never says ...”

“... the abominable to the merely unsavoury.In the case of Holocaust denial – the crime for which David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from returning to Austria – the fear of contagion in some countries is based on rational horror instructed by recent experience. That is the argument for making an exception to the belief that the ...”

“... come from rather out-of-the-way places, at least in geopolitical terms: Vico from Naples; Hume and Adam Smith from Edinburgh; Rousseau from Geneva; Kant from Königsberg. But because the 18th century was also, in the end, an Age of Revolution, its two most important political thinkers do not really belong in this club of international ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”

“... of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 pages; volumes by Christopher Hibbert and Saul David hover around 500.) Seen from certain perspectives, what had happened was a complete collapse of British security, authority and intelligence. The first real mutiny novel, Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859), captured this frank, demoralising view ...”

“... with clockwork regularity. Of course, some of the reading is important: Emerson’s struggle with Hume; his discovery of Plato (though ‘Emerson found Plato the way Schliemann found Troy’ strikes me as a comically portentous way of putting it); the effect of Rousseau; the crucial influence of Carlyle; the inspiration of Goethe; his attraction to various ...”

“... and lip-reading – is not obviously a bad mode of education for those not deaf at birth. The poet David Wright, deaf from scarlet fever at the age of seven, tells, in Deafness: A Personal Account, how glad he is to have been at that kind of school. The people on whom oralism worked had some experience of speech and seem also to have been intrinsically ...”