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“... of going on.Murdoch became world famous as a novelist, and is the subject of a fine biography by Peter Conradi, but the lives of the others are not so well known. Anscombe, Murdoch and Midgley all came from middle-class families in suburban London. Their abilities were evident early, and they were encouraged to go to university. Not so Foot. Philippa ...”

“... accent, and who used to sign off with the phrase ‘Hearty Cheerios!’ The name was also given to Norman Baillie-Stewart, a Scot who had been imprisoned in the Tower in 1933 for selling military secrets to the Germans, and was one of the first Britons to join the English language service in Berlin. Barrington described his creation as speaking ‘English of ...”

“... about his strong claim to be the discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, which is ably defended by Norman Daniels in his book Thomas Reid’s ‘Inquiry’ (now reissued with a useful new Afterword); nor about many of the finer details of his epistemology and metaphysics, such as his most excellent defence of the primary/secondary quality distinction, or his ...”

“... in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the years: fear of ...”

“... Montjuich cemetery; from urban engineering, such as Calatrava’s railway station in Zurich or Norman Foster’s Stansted air terminal, to a sprinkling of housing developments, culminating in Bofill’s deliberately magnificent ensemble in Cergy-Pontoise and Leon Krier’s deliciously classical Atlantis; from a few individual dwellings (Gehry’s Schnabel ...”

“... my entire top shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen ...”

“... the Russians, one has to turn to the authoritative and attractively-written book of that title by Peter McCarey. Like Bold, Buthlay attends to links between the linguistic adventurousness of Joyce and that of MacDiarmid: but where Bold relates MacDiarmid’s advocacy of the Caledonian antisyzygy to a generally post-Hegelian consciousness, Buthlay indicates ...”

“... short stories from which equally mediocre horror films have been made; and Michael Howell and Peter Ford’s The True History of the Elephant Man. The best of the lot is the last, a well-researched and level-headed biography that tells us considerably more about Joseph Merrick than we knew before. For example: Treves recorded that he carried about with ...”

“... It vulgarised the past, prettified it into palatability, rather as Beaton’s photographs and Norman Hartnell’s frocks produced a style for queens and princesses which seemed to have some kind of historical authority, but was flattering and gauzy rather than stiff and formal. The autumnal overtones, forced sprightliness and nostalgic theatricality of ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... have been known for years and have been drawn on by biographers and critics like Morton Cohen and Peter Berresford Ellis. Here the Haggard collector and enthusiast D.S. Higgins has selected about one-fortieth of the text and presented it in an edition which deserves to be called amateur. He has not indicated omissions by ellipses, the annotation is ...”

“... a bad press. H.G. Wells is ‘a satyromaniac’, Ford Madox Ford has bad breath and a dirty mind, Norman Douglas is ‘filthy’ and ‘boy shagging’, T.S. Eliot is wrong about the Tarot pack and also (in which case, among many others) about Seneca’s act-division (‘there was a lot of the dilettante about Eliot’), Bernard van Dieren is a ‘dim thing ...”

“... given their views or at least their prejudices. Apart from probably the Daily Mail and probably Peter Oborne in the Spectator, they look to be doing what they did last time: preferring defeat to victory and political dogma to common sense. Having been so wrong in 2001, our right-wing experts might have confessed as much to their readers before trumpeting ...”

“... rare that someone is individually responsible for a collapse. My professor at architecture school, Peter Galdi, liked to talk about the Manhattan Bridge. It was then nearly a hundred years old; maintenance on the bridge had been deferred for decades; a thorough survey had been made of its soft spots. No one, Galdi told us, knew what was holding it ...”

“... When the Germans occupied His Pasteur Institute With all those poor dogs Paulin has also praised Peter Reading for being ‘user-hostile’, and for contriving, by avoiding iambs, to demonstrate ‘his dissidence from the state’. The preface to Paulin’s excellent Faber Book of Vernacular Verse explains his preference for demotic diction and the natural ...”