“... lefthandedly by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form. Raban has some engaging remarks on this subject. As he says, very few people can ...”

“... of tempo. But the two men were surely creative opposites in a far more fundamental way. Mozart may on occasion have attempted to imitate Haydn (the curiously athematic slow movement of the E flat major String Quartet from the set he dedicated to Haydn, which draws on the slow movement from the older composer’s quartet in the same key Op.20 Nol; or the ...”

“... intent. A manila envelope made in and posted from a Manila recently under the control of Marcos may contain an explosive device, particularly if the cover of the book it ostensibly contains has a savage Nicholas Garland illustration of a wild horseman wielding a bloody scimitar, surrounded by the decapitated victims of his havoc. If the poems of Manila ...”

“... and the quasi-religious cults of personality which drive popular music marketing, are artists who may never ‘perform’ in public, may make music under a plethora of different names, and distribute their work through an underground network of DJs and specialist record shops. At the receiving end, the listeners and dancers ...”

“... and another conception of the good, both inadequate. Other people have said this, and they may be right. But MacIntyre is peculiar in thinking that this is just about all that needs to be said about liberalism. What this line of criticism shows is that liberalism has failed to understand itself: but that, on MacIntyre’s own admissions, is true of all ...”

“... as ever. Never has philosophy been so fast, so neat.’ In view of all these successes it may be surprising to find that Ayer habitually thought of himself as an ‘outsider’ and ‘self-made’, exaggerating the poverty of his family, looking at the world, as his widow, Dee Wells, puts it, with ‘big desiring eyes’, and, despite a career of ...”

“... Macmillan found him a crashing bore and his politics were similarly far from exciting. Yet he may have been more important than posterity has allowed. R.J.Q. Adams makes that case quietly but firmly. He was, on the face of it, an unusual choice for Party leader. To begin with, he was middle-class, a businessman with interests in metal and banking, when ...”

“... be relevant. If the brain does different tasks at different places, that rather suggests that it may do them in different ways. Whereas, if anything that the brain can do it can do just about anywhere, that rather suggests that different kinds of thinking may recruit quite similar neural mechanisms. So empiricists, since ...”

“... have the sixth and final volume of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters. George Lyttelton died on 1 May 1962, thus ending a correspondence which had begun in 1955; the first of the volumes edited by the survivor was published in 1978, the rest have appeared at intervals since. ‘For beginners’, as Rupert Hart-Davis puts it, mindful of those who have had to ...”

“... in his new biography aims to set the record straight in this regard – although not, it may be said at once, at the expense of a full account of O.B.’s career as a teacher of near-genius and a far-sighted educational reformer. To some extent he has been at a disadvantage as compared with his predecessor. O.B. kept a diary: this was available to ...”

“... Gaudier-Brzeska, and to Ezra Pound’s first translations from the Chinese – a Britain that we may think of as snuffed out on the Somme, though on the contrary it seems to have been given its quietus by the depraved insouciance of Bloomsbury. As Tomlinson writes the history, it goes like this: The wave of energy throughout Europe and England, which made ...”

“... soon for them to have a History. Also, Histories, however strongly some professional historians may dispute the fact, have to have a point in the present, and it is by no means clear what this point, for the Social Democrats, should be In 1981 and 82, in the first flush of success, it might have seemed that it was to explain the beginning of the breaking of ...”

“... state does not set goals to human activity, but only prescribes limits to the ways in which people may pursue their goals within it – this is what Oakeshott has called an adverbial concept of law. Individuals are not formed by the state: the state is formed by the wills of individuals. What makes Hobbes attractive to Oakeshott is, I believe, this sort of ...”

“... Government was subsidising members of the Jacobin Club who advocated extremist policies. They may, of course, have been genuine radicals, or careerists who had put their money – or rather Pitt’s – on extremism and were grateful to be paid for what they would have done in any case. Whoever they were, they do not seem to have made much ...”

“... a ‘catastrophe’? On the other hand, a situation of relative land plenty and labour shortage may have led to a renewed emphasis on slavery. This may explain why the seventh and eighth-century wars in which so many Anglo-Saxon kings lost their lives bear many of the characteristics of slave hunts. They were also, of ...”