“... is not demonstrable, but that it cannot without circularity be shown to be even probable. It may be that later authors have been able to make out a case for applying canons of rationality to inductive procedures, but it was rather Hume’s way to contrast rationality with what he regarded as the legitimate force of custom. One gets a very different ...”

“... on those grounds ‘it would be impossible in some cases to fill the bench’. When the Labour MP David Kirkwood was tried for incendiary speech-making in November that year, the chairman of the bench turned out to have been a Conservative candidate in the previous election who ‘not many months ago was saying what he would do with the “Reds” … and how ...”

“... contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this smallest notion of dust. How to purge the dismal objection to this, remains a question. Not to be ...”

“... subscribing to le dernier cri from Europe’. Rothko dominates an essay in the Hopper catalogue by David Anfam, the author of the Rothko catalogue raisonné, who notes that ‘so much has been written about Edward Hopper that perhaps one of the few remaining royal roads by which to approach him is via another massively interpreted artist.’ Anfam makes the ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... than taking responsibility and growing up, as Pinocchio does at the end of Collodi’s book). This may be hokum, but it’s also deeply affecting. As Steven Spielberg recognised in his SF version of Pinocchio, A.I., the only way to crank up the pathos still further is to remove Geppetto’s love. In A.I., an android boy, ...”

“... filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a ...”

“... must also come to terms with him as a political thinker. His critique of corporate capitalism may not be theoretically sophisticated, but it is coherent and powerful – and very American. Indeed, his provincial Americanism may be both a strength and a weakness: he has never been able to bring foreign policy into ...”

“... electronic music in particular. ‘Only through the use of electrical means,’ he writes, ‘may important advances in the exploration of sound be made’: ‘American music will be enlivened and enriched by such exploration and use of new musical materials. These can best be brought about through the co-operation of scientists with a real appreciation ...”

“... cholera epidemic, but the epidemic had subsided, and the anticipated dead had not arrived. ‘May God preserve the City of London/And make this place a terror to evil-doers,’ the foundation stone read. HMP Holloway, which was the largest women’s prison in Western Europe at its closure in 2016, at first held 120 men and 27 women, as well as a number of ...”

“... for the narrator’s habitual academic delivery, one baulks at this stilted sentence: ‘You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity [my italics] from that petty bourgeois atmosphere...’ This is exceptional and no worse than Hingley’s maladroit update in ...”

“... Nashe. In 1599 the bishops had ordered ‘that all Nashe’s books ... be taken wheresoever they may be found and that none of [his] books be ever printed hereafter.’ Within two years, having been prohibited from earning his living as a writer, Nashe had died, in extreme poverty. In Middleton’s fable, the Nightingale, who is herself a poet, laments to ...”

“... in the best manner of spy novels; and is very well served by his translator, the veteran David Floyd. This is the fourth volume he has distilled from his experience and he is about to produce a fifth, on the Spetsnaz – against whom Britain’s expensive ‘Brave Defender’ exercise was directed earlier this year. Having completed his five-year GRU ...”

“... by major mutinies: some large towns were held by mutineers with local support for up to a week. In May 1949 two frontier battalions defected, with their officers, to the North. Meanwhile, guerrilla warfare broke out throughout much of the South, and was particularly strong on Cheju Island, off the south coast – the furthest point from North Korea. Cumings ...”

“... as if they/Could master all things.’ All this has a bearing on the before and after story that David Ellis wants us to take more seriously as the real story of Byron’s life. In Ellis’s view the summer of 1816, which he spent in Geneva, marked a turning point in Byron’s life. He was, Ellis tells us, acutely unhappy there, though the unhappiness had a ...”