“... and sustain the inertia they claim to despise. From this charge Brian O’Nolan is exempt. His major work, At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman, exemplifies an aesthetic process both innovative and destructive without parallel among his contemporaries. That dominance of the aesthetic places O’Nolan in the tradition of Joyce and Beckett, a position ...”

“... though they have knowledge of each other’s work and exchange compliments through their friend John Kenyon. The 573 letters of the courtship alone (1845-6) lie ahead; further on are the rich records of the Brownings’ life in Italy, and then the less familiar, and therefore more often surprising, documents of Browning’s later years. (Here, too, the ...”

“... musical training at an age when Berlioz had never used a piano or heard an orchestra. According to John Deathridge, Wagner wanted posterity to view him as an autodidact; but this claim should not be taken, as it apparently is by Cairns, at face value. He is right, of course, that Berlioz’s early years were not wasted for they contributed indispensable ...”

“... Santa Cruz County, 333 were in Watsonville, as were 553 of the 2438 buildings countywide suffering major damage. We walked along Lincoln St and at first all seemed well, aside from tumbled chimneys announcing the folly of building with brick in California. Then there’d be a swath of disaster: boarded-up windows, porches askew, red tags on the front door ...”

“... productive and interesting personnel with those of others excluded from attention. The book’s major strength, which ought to have been capitalised upon to a greater extent, is its use of the personal testimony of élite gardeners culled mainly from the various gardening magazines. This is turned to good use in many places, particularly in the discussion ...”

“... chip.’ Wilson had little to say about the pencil: what it achieved was too ephemeral. Nor did John Middleton Murry in his book called Pencillings, where despite his title, he left the pencil alone: instead, he included one chapter on ‘The Golden Pen’. It was left to Nabokov to produce an alternative view of the writer’s contribution to history from ...”

“... far more interestingly, as a dense and far-ranging discussion of knowledge, and as the source of major epistemological issues and debates from the Hellenistic period to modern times. Burnyeat sees the function of his Introduction as being that of encouraging the reader to find in the first dialogue, Socrates’s dialogue with Theaetetus, the spur to a second ...”

“... however, let his people off too lightly, particularly the ‘successful men’ he admits are his major concern, as it is their monuments to God and to themselves which survive for us to admire. He lets off the uncivilised Normans, with whom the book begins, least lightly. His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came ...”

“... and rewarding job. He gravitated gently to Sydney, Australia, where he became a friend of the Rev. John McKnight, a rector in a slum area. Under McKnight’s influence, he moved towards Christian ideas. He liked the way McKnight applied his religion to the real world, and shared the rector’s horror of nuclear weapons. ‘Christians,’ said ...”

“... Blanche Patch, for her part, considered that he was a man ‘at peace with himself’. Another major topic in the present Letters is his love-affair with Mrs Patrick Campbell in 1912-13, and here his style strikes me as less effective. The clowning in his letters is funny enough – only Shaw could have written to his romantic beloved: ‘You turned a cold ...”

“... approach. The most notable example is the great contribution to the theory of justice presented by John Rawls, who pioneered the revival of the contractarian approach, but has increasingly stressed the universalist concerns of a Kantian concept of ‘the person’ (especially in his 1980 Dewey Lectures*). The recent emergence of the so-called ‘Bob Geldof ...”

“... Spain, Germany and the Americas; its characters a Croatian Catholic priest called Draganovic and Major Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced that no papers would be ...”

“... led to a reconsideration of their practice as teachers. The book’s editors, Stephen Eyers and John Richmond, suggest what this work meant for them as teachers: ‘The study of language in schools is not essentially to do with the reading of reports or the shaping of policy documents (though the presence of reports and the need for statements of policy may ...”

“... of the picture’s export from Italy was raised. Meanwhile, the attribution to Raphael made by John Shearman, the prominent Raphael scholar who was then at the Courtauld Institute, was widely challenged, sometimes in very strong terms. And then the picture had to be returned to Italy. It must have seemed as if the Museum of Fine Arts had been copped for ...”

“... echo in Namier’s fascination with the collective and the irrational. Freudianism was another major influence, imbibed by way of Freud’s disciple Theodor Reik, whom Namier met in Vienna in the 1920s. Reik told him that psychoanalysis could cure his insomnia. We shouldn’t overplay the intellectual pedigree of Namier’s ideas, however. When at Balliol ...”