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“... omelette from their eyebrows was pantomime entertainment at its finest. Whatever lessons the joke may have had for our attitude towards critics in general, some of the protagonists in this particular episode had unmistakably been asking for it. Vera Durbe, curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Leghorn, who had originally organised the dragging of the ...”

“... the simplicity of the heart and its all but inevitable degradation by society. The biography may be theoretical, as in Émile and the discourse on inequality, or literary, as in the character of Saint-Preux, for instance, in La Nouvelle Héloise, or literal, as in the Confessions. Yet can one trust such introspection? Can one trust the particular ...”

“... a landscape background for his portrait of Eleanora of Toledo and Campbell suggests that he ‘may have been almost parodying an archaic and expensive convention’. Perhaps this was a revival (if not ‘almost a parody’), but Bronzino’s horizon is placed far below Eleanor’s head, thus enhancing her grandeur, and the sky is of so deep a blue that we ...”

“... many less serious viral infections; there is no quick way of reassuring a patient who suspects he may have the disease. (The BMJ recently carried advice to doctors on a whole new problem – the treatment of anxiety and depression among homosexuals who fear they may have AIDS.) Time alone can tell: but if you have the ...”

“... the theory of meaning, should be recognised as the foundation of philosophy in general. That claim may reasonably be viewed with the scepticism that any such claim inspires, but it is certainly true that language is, and has long been, a major matter of concern among analytical philosophers, and few have applied themselves to the subject with the tenacity and ...”

“... and not others, but social conditions or personal choice that lead wrongdoers to do wrong. The law may be able to mitigate the consequences for those who offend through misfortune, but it cannot treat them as free of blame without forfeiting the very claim to even-handedness which its detractors mock. But Blake, too, was right to claim that one law for all is ...”

“... his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his final suicide: when his lost child returns, Greene’s hero does not recognise her, but falls in love with ...”

“... me personally, particularly in their effect upon the unwritten codes which govern the things that may be said, the questions that may be asked, and the language which may be used in the ordinary social intercourse of ‘respectable’ people. In this context, as might be expected, most ...”

“... submitted in evidence: how to allow for the possibility that intercepted communications may have been deliberately planted, that informers may have embellished their reports in order to please their paymasters, or that raw intelligence may have been misunderstood and ...”

“... it, yet no one else seems capable of replacing Labour as the main party of opposition. Theresa May commands the battlefield and her enemies have scattered. But is this really what a one-party state looks like? This isn’t Turkey. There have been no mass demonstrations in support of the regime; no culls of public institutions or collective firings of ...”

“... today often seems rather a shoddy affair. Many are PC, even if almost unconsciously so; and it may be that in taking up a novel readers would rather get away from all that. Kingsley Amis in the past could hardly have been accused of being PC, but in his latest there are impalpable traces of it, like mist beginning to thicken round a craggy old ...”

“... implies that while he expects informed readers to grant most of his premisses, he knows that they may find it hard to adjust to a rigorous enforcement of them, at least where they affect style.’ It needs to be said that the book’s worth is not co-terminous with the cogency of its main argument. This argument, remarkable for its feats of synthesising, is ...”

“... artwork, or is it merely an indication that my perceptual faculties are not tuned in? Some days I may get all choked up listening to Mahler; on others I seem to be indifferent. An answer to the question with which I began might be closer to my second response to Mahler’s music, since the most common feeling on encountering an artwork is, in ...”

“... to reduce the total amount of killing. Other acts with equally horrific consequences, though, may be morally permissible in some circumstances. Bombing to damage the enemy war apparatus – ‘strategic’ bombing – may sometimes be permissible, even though one foresees that it will kill many innocent bystanders. The ...”

“... a blazing log fire in the synthetic chill. Extreme as Nixon’s virtuoso double-polluting habits may seem now, he was more in tune with the American public mood on matters of temperature control than the only President who tried to rein in his nation’s growing addiction to air-conditioning, Jimmy Carter. In 1979, in the wake of the leap in oil ...”