“... content and moral force that they continue to mark a deep cleavage in Western philosophising. Jung may have meant that we start out as realists or nominalists and follow our assigned destinies. His maxim reaches far beyond that. We are either Plato’s friend or Aristotle’s friend. Murdoch brings her friends, Schopenhauer, Simone ...”

“... rewards and punishments, the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, to be effective. ‘Virtue may owe her panegyrics to morality, but must derive her authority from religion.’ This analysis is a particular application of a more general principle. Johnson believed that all human effort springs from the elementary passions of avoiding pain and seeking ...”

“... intended, for all your rational revulsion or boredom or disapproval of the outworn ideologies they may sanction. The last dissenting emotion is perhaps the one most frequently aroused at present. Children’s stories from the past are continually disparaged for being insufficiently egalitarian, or wide-ranging, or whatever. Robert Leeson, in Reading and ...”

“... Geof instead. Helen and Jo, it seems, don’t expect to live stupidly ever after.Helen and Jo may have low expectations but they have strong desires – for romance, sex, fun, colour, ‘a taste of honey’. Men offer that, if only fleetingly, and Helen and Jo grab it with both hands. ‘Listen, love, I’m old enough to be your mother,’ Helen tells ...”

“... to withdraw his trust from the ideas he has picked up over the years from his senses. They may not be perfectly systematic or ideally precise, and he knows they have sometimes misled him; but he sees no point in supposing that his entire experience of the world might be shot through with vanity and delusion. He tries to reassure himself by recalling a ...”

“... of Hizbollah (which was to play the major role in finally driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in May 2000). Faced with the prospect of Israeli vassalage after Sharon’s Army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred and was assassinated on 14 September. Israeli troops occupied Beirut, supposedly to keep order, and two days ...”

“... supported by the money his brother made. His even greater good fortune was to have an uncle, Richard Lloyd, who believed in him and backed him, convinced that he was a prodigy – an opinion Lloyd George shared. From the earliest days, there were scandals relating to affairs and paternity suits to be hushed up; the list of his conquests would include ...”

“... surely Attlee’s most important speech, after Chamberlain, deserted by ninety of his own MPs in May 1940, appealed to Attlee to join him in a national government. Attlee’s reply (‘Prime minister, our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either’) was what made Churchill prime minister – as fateful ...”

“... minimalist works, and to some extent of Einstein. When you look at what’s being repeated, you may wonder at the tolerance of those who can happily sit for ten or 15 minutes at a stretch listening to the same commonplace two or four-beat figure over and over, without audible variation. Compare the opening of Akhnaten with the introduction to Handel’s ...”

“... which the novel creates its fevered satirical vision. It’s reminiscent, in different ways, of Richard Brautigan and of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, as well as of Burroughs, but it seems not to have been a way of writing she wanted to continue with. One of the strengths of the new collection is that it contains the unfinished draft of the novel Quin was writing ...”

“... campaign for the mayoralty, which the long-serving Tom Bradley is about to relinquish. Businessman Richard Riordan, one of 24 candidates to succeed him, seems to be promising that all the unpleasantness of South Central will somehow be removed. He puts it less plainly even than this, however: his paid-for advertising slots include a sound-bite in which a ...”

“... a study of Dylan’s lyrics.1 Day was on a panel discussing Dylan’s purported sexism with Richard Brown (Leeds University, Joyce), Neil Corcoran (Sheffield University, modern poetry) and Kath Burlinson, who has just stopped being half of the cabaret act ‘The Wild Girls’ and has settled down to do a PhD in 19th-century women’s poetry. Victorian ...”

“... Goering had created to co-opt potential opponents. In November, he was made vice-president (to Richard Strauss’s president) of the newly created Reichsmusikkammer (Goebbels’s baby), to which henceforth all musicians wishing to work professionally had to belong. In January 1934, he signed a contract as director of the Berlin State Opera. But by the end ...”

“... this position during the period with which we are concerned.’ Thus, the introduction of Sir Richard Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages. Bartlett quoted it in a perceptive recent tribute to Southern, with the rider that ‘every century has its protagonists,’ but ‘those who see the 11th and 12th centuries as a time of particularly significant ...”

“... himself on a winning streak when he opened Rawlinson Poet MS 160. The fact that the poem is bad may be an embarrassment. Robin Robbins’s attack on arguments for its authorship based on parallels may be – is – convincing. But no one has positively disproved Shakespeare’s involvement, and given the conventional ...”