“... of an apparently seamless whole.If time isn’t continuous, it becomes barely recognisable. In Robert Coover’s great story ‘Going for a Beer’, barely a thousand words long, the continuousness is deceptive, belonging to language and not to the experience language claims to represent. ‘He finds himself sitting in the neighbourhood bar drinking a ...”

“... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with ...”

“... of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made ...”

“... parts don’t sound very disconsolate. A large number were addressed to Elizabeth Cameron, the young and beautiful wife of a Pennsylvania Senator. He had begun to write to her effusively, almost flirtatiously, in 1886 while travelling in Japan. Several years later he was patently love-sick. The long and detailed letters he sent her – a travel ...”

“... is the appearance hereabouts of some parting advice one mother gave to her son, the young Scottish MP James Fergusson, as he set out for Westminster: ‘Never expose yourself, James, to be tried for a rape, for your broad shoulders will cause a jury to think it probable you made the attempt, and your face will make it manifest that it must have ...”

“... their engagement rings like one-bead rosaries’. Or again, in contrasting the styles in which young middle-class and working-class women walk, he says of the latter that they ‘tend to walk from the knees, trottily’. The observation may not allow enough for changing styles of skirts and shoes, but ‘trottily’ is perfect. His prose is marbled with ...”

“... of a reformed sinner castigating his own erstwhile lapses’ – and variously attributed to Robert Henderson and Angus Morrison. Music Ho! is more accurately prophetic, too, than Motion allows. He deems rather improbable the hailing of Sibelius as avatar of the music of the future: yet Sibelius’s symphonic form-building is seen more clearly in its ...”

“... those who endure? Tomlinson’s ‘Up at La Serra’ dramatises the restricting circumstances of a young Italian poet called Paolo Bertolani,                 who had no more to offer than a sheaf of verse          in the style of Quasimodo. Bertolani has since achieved a style of his own; his most recent volume, Seina, is written in ...”

“... philosophy. But Kant himself had written a less purely critical third Critique. In this, as Robert Solomon describes it in an accessible and entertaining new study of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kant had returned to nature ‘not as the phenomenal world of the understanding and the causal laws of Newton’s physics, but as the “supersensible” universe ...”

“... the dispute was not about the Court of Assistants. The conflict concerned the struggle of the ‘young men’ outside the Livery for constitutional and financial benefits, and culminated in the creation of the yeomanry. The Goldsmith Court Minute Book leaves no doubt as to the true nature of the episode. I suggested in my book that in the 1630s the City was ...”

“... friend: The road to Sligo. A spring morning. 1798. Going into battle. Do you remember, James? Two young gallants with pikes across their shoulders and the Aeneid in their pockets. Everything seemed to find definition that spring – a congruence, a miraculous matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh, green land. The ...”

“... her husband faced prolonged imprisonment, Adams’s wife committed suicide, leaving him with three young daughters to raise. Since the right of habeas corpus does not exist in Switzerland, Adams was held for three months before trial and was not even allowed to attend his wife’s funeral. Though subsequently convicted and ordered to pay costs, he received a ...”

“... a tension. This appeal to unanalysed pre-propositional intuition flies in the face of everything young analytic philosophers are taught in school. When it comes to offering an explanation, Nozick answers the question ‘What is it about (some of) our decisions, what feature do they have, that lifts them above the nexus of causal determination?’ by saying ...”

“... chapter, ‘Going down fighting’. This ‘life and times’ examines Scargill’s personal rise: Young Communist militant; Area Council delegate at the age of 26; compensation agent in 1972 at the age of 34, having just attained national prominence in the ‘battle of Saltley gates’; Yorkshire president a year later; national president in ...”

“... and Penthouse, with a script by Gore Vidal. It starred Malcolm McDowell as a convincingly bonkers young emperor, backed up by a group of A-list actors, including Gielgud and Helen Mirren, who were said to have been unaware of the soft porn enterprise in which they were involved. (Did they think that Guccione was bankrolling serious historical drama?) Much ...”