“... 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 ...”

“... of English artists and intellectuals. Her great-uncle was the painter Rudolph Lehmann, friend of Robert Browning and George Eliot. Her father, R.C. Lehmann, was a well-known writer and man of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother John Lehmann, poet, and fructifying editor and founder of the London ...”

“... Swedish documents), Dame Veronica’s account of the war was scarcely challenged for a generation. Robert Ergang’s The Myth of the All-Destructive Fury of the Thirty Years’ War (1956) concentrated on the exaggerated accounts of its economic consequences. S.H. Steinberg’s The ‘Thirty Years’ War ‘and the Conflict for European Hegemony (1967), a ...”

“... of kills at only 3 to 10 per cent of targets engaged. Other experts were more pessimistic; Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the radar authority, rated the chances of interception at a thousand to one. Nevertheless, according to Long-mate, operational trials were conducted and began to look promising. By that time, fortunately, the launching-sites had been destroyed ...”

“... and nothing at all about the antagonism that at times should have dominated his awareness: that of Robert Falcon Scott towards Gran himself. Perhaps during the expedition Gran unconsciously censored that awareness, or perhaps in his youthful naivety he did not even have it. Gran at 21 was the youngest man to join the expedition. The great polar traveller ...”