“... of knowing what he’s doing but who for some reason seems to be taking one round the houses. It may be that The Nature of the Book is most rewardingly approached not in the hope of finding a coherent thesis in it but as a miscellany of essays, or perhaps as an attempt to write too many interesting books at once. Johns’s starting-point is indignation. He ...”

“... of stage props?’ Then he adds, a little sadly: ‘The only difference is that our predecessors may have truly believed. I cannot believe; I know too much.’ This confession gets at a major problem faced by contemporary doctors. The more effective their medical technology, the less faith they have in the power of their office. Doctors have come to believe ...”

“... in three languages. Then, suddenly, she turned her back on dancing and began to manifest what may have been symptoms of mental illness. Why Lucia gave up dancing is not clear, and Shloss refrains from rushing to judgment. She may have had an abortion which injured her health, or the jealous Nora ...”

“... and had a special class of men trained up to do just that. Present-day America has not, and this may account for some of the undoubted blunders in postwar Iraq. Lord Cromer, born Evelyn Baring, came from that class. With Lords Curzon and Milner, he was one of the trio of great imperial proconsuls in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He has always seemed ...”

“... as anybody else would have done, into a pattern of denial or a strategy for revenge. My mind may reason that the tenseness only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion. One day along the path he brushed my breast in passing, and I thought, Does this efflorescence offend him? And I went into the redwoods ...”

“... alerts us to what goes on in Williams, it also alerts us to what goes on in Koch. Koch’s poetry may come addressed to others, but it likes to please itself. This is as true of the seemingly impenetrable poems that he wrote at the start of his career as it is of his most lucid comic turns. But while he can write a poetry so delighted that the exclamation ...”

“... part of this enterprise, and in Williams’s hands it becomes a subtle appreciation of ideas that may be fundamentally unlike anything we could think now, but that also help us to understand our own ideas better. Two of his best books were on historical subjects: Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (1978) and Shame and Necessity (1993), a profound study of ...”

“... contact with a mind-independent world. These (and other) familiar objections to inferentialism may have merit, but we can ignore them for present purposes since Bermúdez’s book looks kindly on the language of thought version of the inferentialist tradition. At least, the first half does. One more preliminary: I’ve been speaking rather freely about ...”

“... Normandy with a dream of being brave, a smart looker on his arm. Rewatching these films today, we may wonder how aware Bogart and Bacall were of what they were up to. Call it art or propaganda – but for a time the two of them fell for it, as if they were watching their own movie. The best film stars are so often their first audiences. So it was with these ...”

“... the loss of Mongolia. The United States approached its current mainland form in the 1880s. This may be an age of states, but some of them are so big that global politics is for the most part still a game for subcontinental powers. Size, of course, is not a virtue in itself, and very large states have their own problems. Plato thought the ideal state would ...”

“... On 21 May​Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire after eleven days of fighting, but the days of ‘quiet’ – as the New York Times tellingly describes the last seven years, in which Israel intensified its domination over the Palestinians with impunity – are over. Dead, too, is Trump’s plan to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents ...”

“... they had fought between 1914 and 1918. The 66,000 casualties that the BEF would suffer between 10 May and 25 June were a measure of their disastrous failure to grasp what it was that they were facing.No doubt the bridge four steadily improved their game as they got to know one another’s bidding habits and foibles. Monica Sandison wrote at least two letters ...”

“... Richter’s portraits (an exhibition of them runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 31 May) are pictures of photographs. Pictures of photographs, not pictures based on photographs, which is how you would describe them if the photograph took the place of a preparatory drawing. The effect is nothing like that of a painting which, placed alongside its ...”

“... next research project. One of the reasons breaking up with someone by text message or on Facebook may not be a good idea is the difficulty of judging tone. Take the sad case of Halle and Doug (‘Halle’ is the pseudonym of one of Gershon’s interviewees). While they were going out, they had a running joke, conducted largely by text message, based on the ...”

“... on each child some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token, so that the child may be known thereafter if necessary’. By 1790, 18,000 of these objects had been collected; women had continued to leave them for decades after they were replaced by paper receipts in 1760. The Victorians exhibited some of the old tokens, and accidentally ...”