“... the revival of liberal political philosophy in the United States in the 1960s, and his reviews of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin remain some of the most acute there are. But these philosophers started from within. They may have been prompted to write by the establishment of civil rights in the 1960s and the domestic consequences of the Vietnam War, but these ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... they can just as well stand in place of one. Deliverology allowed Blair to follow his whims, which took him all over the map. What it didn’t do was force him to face up to his weaknesses as a politician. These included a lack of historical perspective and a craven inability to face down Gordon Brown. When Blair met a barrier in the way of something he wanted ...”

“... and art’ preoccupied Gray in equal measure. The writing of his first novel, Lanark, which took two decades, went hand in hand with his studies at the Glasgow School of Art and his first commissions as a painter of large-scale, teeming, Hieronymus Bosch-style murals. From the mid-1960s he also made a decent living writing plays for BBC television and ...”

“... many roots in your poems. Why so many?’ Neruda, reporting this remark in his memoirs, took it as a joke, which it probably was, and as a compliment, which it probably wasn’t. Isla Negra has a whole section, originally a separate volume, called ‘The Hunter after Roots’, and Neruda is not the sort of poet who hunts for things he can’t ...”

“... Oxfordshire and Bloomsbury, where Philipps was colonised by the Stracheys: Lytton was his mentor, John got him into left-wing politics, and at various points he was in analysis with James and in bed with Julia. Philipps’s father funded him while he tried to develop a career as a painter, but even by the lowish standards of Bloomsbury he was a terrible ...”

“... both morals and the constraints on writing luridly about the consequences), the Sunday Pictorial took on the role of public educator and serialised a pamphlet to help parents explain to children how a baby was born: ‘The sperms of men, like those of the four-legged animals, live in a little bag. The father places the sperms in the body of the mother in ...”

“... palace in a fuck-you show of force.The F-35 is the most expensive weapon ever built. Israel took delivery of its first two exemplars a month before the Mezzeh raid, and it’s worth bearing in mind that no one with any knowledge of how air forces operate thinks it’s remotely likely that the IAF would have risked its new baby so soon, and on such a ...”

“... sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and then lost her marbles to be given an entirely fair trial for at least another ...”

“... catching the light in a different way, or note the yellow tunic of the figure I supposed to be St John with what felt like fresh, or better, vision. I wondered if the new emptiness that had fallen on the city had somehow added clarity to the art. As a good Catholic, I like the Crucifixion; indeed, I prefer it to the Resurrection, which always seems a bit too ...”

“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked Dryden’s ...”

“... who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century series, The Beauties of England and Wales, which is sometimes cited in the texts. Pevsner on occasion ...”

“... meaning was first used. One result of the scale of the ambition behind the dictionary was that it took years for an agreement to be reached between the founders and Oxford University Press. Progress stalled as editors changed, and when Murray took over the paperwork related to Furnivall’s early attempts at quotation ...”

“... Coleman went to Wellesley College and then married Loyd Ring Coleman. She gave birth to a son, John, in 1924, contracted puerperal fever, and was confined for two months as a mental patient in Rochester State Hospital. Recovered, she journeyed with her husband to Paris, where he worked in advertising. For a while Coleman wrote a society column for the ...”

“... how this ‘Moriarty of the book world’ met his match in a duo of intrepid young book dealers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, whose investigation is ‘worthy of fiction’. The ‘impossibly debonaire’ Carter, with his immaculately pressed Savile Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter ...”