“... sense’. The notions it deals with – ‘courage’ and ‘compassion’, for example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of ...”

“... in this way, Chamberlain was able to raise ‘news management’, in the words of the historian Richard Cockett, ‘almost to the level of an exact science’. Obviously, it’s a long march from making Lord Halifax look like an appeaser (which Harris might have pointed out he was already) to making Michael Heseltine look like a fool or a knave, which ...”

“... who were later to denounce it as obscene. Football is itself violent, of course – my friend Richard Wollheim once broke it to me that he was unable to look at a game, for this reason. But it has always distinguished between an allowable and an alien violence, and the rules it has for that purpose generally work. None of the really outstanding players ...”

“... behalf. Structured in short episodic chunks, Slide focuses on the mid-life melancholy of one Richard Verey, a 35-year-old Englishman. Oxford-educated, old-shoe patrician, Verey is trying to recover pieces of a life that seems to have passed him by, beginning as a student on vacation in Iran. In a village outside Isfahan he buys a set of antique Russian ...”

“... Even readers who find the sentimentality of Murillo’s images of street arabs difficult to accept may be convinced by Brown’s account of the merits of, say, the moving yet dignified Return of the Prodigal Son, originally painted for the Hospital of Charity of Seville and now to be seen in the National Gallery, Washington. Brown goes so far as to claim that ...”

“... could be restored to integrity,’ says Harrison. Quite so, but Hitler and his green lieutenant Richard Walther Darre throve on that too. (Anna Bramwell’s work in this area is a conspicuous omission from the otherwise excellent bibliography, the length of which makes one pause to reflect on the number of trees which have been cut down in the cause of ...”

“... hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look on, say, Asians, as equals, he found it very tough to extend the same ...”

“... Coward (1992) will have gathered what close friendship sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ...”

“... a reserve squadron of the SAS. Prince Charles, who steered the Benjamin Bowring on her first lap, may have wished that his own tours in support of trade and the flag could be organised with similar lack of protocol. An unsparing account of old-fashioned princely progresses is to be found in The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922, describing tours ...”

“... but as political criticism. We label Coleridge and Hazlitt psychological critics. Coleridge may have been the first to use the word ‘psychological’ in its modern sense, but to contemporaries Hazlitt was something very different: a Jacobinical critic. His book was damned by William Gifford, the most powerful London editor of the day, as a seditious ...”

“... style would for once be wholly appropriate? Why academic presses rather than HarperCollins? This may be mere circumstance. Perhaps film rights are even now being auctioned. But I suspect not. Corbin’s work is not packaged for bookclubs or bestseller lists. He does not present picaresque narratives, inspiring characters or improving parables, but rather ...”

“... Somewhere behind this notion lies the legendary cable Hearst is supposed to have sent to reporter Richard Harding Davis and cartoonist Frederic Remington: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ The line is echoed in Citizen Kane. The Cubans were already fighting for independence from the Spanish, and the US, the argument goes, liked the ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... which we require if we are to believe on similarly rational grounds that God does not exist may not differ from each other in significant ways. Generally, when questions of existence are in doubt, the onus of justification lies with those who maintain that something of such and such a kind does exist, and generally therefore it is reasonable to continue ...”

“... a personal memoir, while John Spurling discusses Farrell’s relations with Stendhal, Thomas Mann, Richard Hughes and Malcolm Lowry, and, by reproducing Farrell’s notes, indicates the general course the story was to have taken. Margaret Drabble writes on the comic undercutting, at their most solemn moments, of Farrell’s characters and their ...”