“... membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those ...”

“... truth Mendacious by default. The phrase was invented, and its applications demonstrated, by Sir Robert Armstrong (now Lord Armstrong), Secretary to the [British] Cabinet and Head of the Secret Service, who when called as a witness in an Australian court, in the course of the so-called ‘Spycatcher’ trial, would not admit to lying, but cheerfully ...”

“... appeared in Punch and the other papers on the eve of the invasion. The celebrated photographer Robert Capa was there, however, at least in the third wave or so, and before he scrambled back on the landing-craft he ‘felt a shock and was suddenly covered in feathers’. He wondered if somebody had been killing chickens. Then I saw that the superstructure ...”

“... to prove the money-earner – Clara remained the celebrity, perforce. Seven children later, Robert went mad (the syphilis theory seems supported by the subsequent life of at least one son). Clara, then still in her early thirties, had to make a renewed success of her career. She became one of the first touring artists to take advantage of the newly ...”

“... A book could be – perhaps already has been – written on art whose success is connected with getting outside the idiom and context of its age. Such art reassures by its apparent timelessness, and depends on the reassurance of anachronism for its populist impact. When Gray observed that ‘the language of the age is never the language of poetry’ he was noting something that the common reader usually takes for granted ...”

“... remote from political reality – this is his verdict on the contemporary works by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Thus liberalism as a stance is liable to a variety of unsatisfactory oscillations and instabilities. Yet what alternatives are there? Dunn is ruthless, and rightly so, with Marxism and any other contemporary doctrine of revolution. This is not just ...”

“... Blasting the past has long been a habit of avant-garde artists and malcontent youth, but anti-passéisme has made small headway in the learned professions. They are keen on roots – for example, the roots of the modern in late 19th-century art, and its roots in romanticism; the cardinal assumption is that everything really starts earlier than you might think ...”

“... Wittgenstein’s famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is written in a style that is austere and sometimes aphoristic. ‘The world is everything that is the case.’ ‘A picture presents a possible situation in logical space.’ ‘A logical picture of facts is a thought.’ ‘We cannot think of anything illogical, for to do so we should have to think illogically ...”

“... investigative journalism, and Ms Moorehead has had to cover a lot of ground with speed. Sir Robert Mark has praised Fortune’s Hostages as a useful handbook: ‘required reading,’ he says, ‘in the unlikely and unhappy event that kidnapping here increased dramatically.’ In the meantime, it is interesting to discover, for example, the scale on ...”

“... in the Brera at Milan. Till now the picture’s identity has remained unknown, but my colleague Robert Dingley, to whose learning this review is much indebted, has identified it as one by the Russian artist Karl Brullov; it shows, in the sentimental fashion of the time, a series of pathetic incidents during the destruction of Pompeii. A year later, Bulwer ...”

“... with working out what life would actually be like in the thought experiments. (He may criticise Robert Nozick’s impractical suggestions for regulating the genetic supermarket, as revealing ‘an unworldly innocence’, but a few chapters later he himself writes that ‘attitudes to privacy will vary according to whether there are governments’ – my ...”

“... friends. The letters haven’t much to say about these books, except for a very good one to Robert Trevelyan about Where angels fear to tread. Mostly, the letters are home thoughts from abroad, weekly reports from some frontier of feeling Forster had either crossed or backed off from. You wouldn’t learn from the letters what it meant for him to fall ...”

“... and mercenary kind) constitute ‘what is right’. Among the essays, one on ‘Homosexuality in Robert Duncan’s Poetry’ makes the same point. The appeal to experience, and alleged vindication by experience, are what Gay Liberation, when it is respectable, is all about; and Gunn’s fearlessness about it, together with his ardent belief that the ...”

“... One of the remarkable things about this case was the sentences handed down by Chief Justice Robert Lowry. While McCaughey and Weir were given life sentences, the other policemen involved in the bar bombing were let off with suspended sentences. McCaughey’s father, who aided his son in concealing the priest on his farm, was also released with a ...”

“... subjectivism. The speculation that we might be brains in a vat seems to be endemic at Harvard. Robert Nozick, in his recent book, argues ingeniously that, though he does not know that it is false, he does know something incompatible with it – namely, that he is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Putnam does not let things get so far, because he thinks that the ...”