“... of the schools. It has even been suggested in the literature, that though a notion of necessity may have some sort of intuition behind it ... this notion [of a distinction between necessary and contingent properties] is just a doctrine made up by some bad philosopher, who (I guess) didn’t realise that there are several ways of referring to the same thing ...”

“... on a visit to André Gide, whose work he had been the first to commend to English readers. In May he undergoes a minor and a major operation in rapid succession, in the interval making arrangements about his next article in the Sunday Times. Within a fortnight he is dead. What, then, of Father and Son, that record of a boy’s struggle to free himself ...”

“... Pritchett’s quietly extraordinary way of looking at life. Of course, the answer to this question may in the end not be very relevant or even interesting, assuming as it must do that an art of such freakish fragility is pierceable by criticism in the first place. Luckily, Pritchett the explicator is on hand with a new collection of essays to provide oblique ...”

“... discreet about the beans, in the manner of a retired mandarin, and one suspects that where he may have been tempted to say a little more, the weevils of official secrecy have been at his manuscript. This is a pity, for although the subject is generally a grey one some of the characters – Brown, Castle, Wilson, Woodcock, Jones – had colour and some of ...”

“... are alien, has left a vast interpenetration largely unexamined. Indeed, all the sins of omission may point to inadmissible ties. Not that Declan Kiberd, director of the Yeats Summer School, would admit them. Citing the ideas of Edward Said, he recently argued that ‘ “Irishness” is simply the experience of being endlessly defined and described, derided ...”

“... young girls, stupid cows or furry little animals. Living on a farm, he should know. Of course, he may spend his days at a word-processor while gleaming machines suck milk from the family’s dairy herd. But we are, I think, being asked to accept his rural credentials as some kind of authentication of the fictions. Further, there’s a sense that part of the ...”

“... attention. We should hear more from some of these women. Now they have been freshly discovered, we may hope to have a printed collection of letters and journals – especially the letters of Elizabeth Amherst, the diary of Sarah Cowper, the Papillon papers and the letters of Marthae Taylor. Elizabeth Bergen Brophy presents us with much material, the object of ...”

“... wag. Everybody seems to be convinced that he is saying something. But brave though his confidence may be it is also one of the more worrying symptoms of a bizarre and poignant neurological disorder. John suffers from dysphasia – or aphasia as it is also called; and it is one of the many paradoxes of his condition that although he can hear perfectly, he ...”

“... powerful ignoramus as opposed to the man of humble wisdom, but makes them more politely – which may explain why, despite dying at approximately the same age as Socrates, he died of natural causes and not the overpowering soporific effects of a hemlock cocktail mixed at state expense. It is interesting that we know of the thought of three of the world’s ...”

“... river, as if he had sometimes been unsure of where he was going, undistracted by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later ...”

“... poison indiscriminately wasn’t compelling even on its own terms. ‘However rapidly technology may invent new uses for insecticides and new ways of applying them,’ Carson wrote, ‘it is likely to find the insects keeping a lap ahead.’Sixty years on, that doesn’t seem like such a safe bet. Carson’s work led to the banning of DDT in agricultural ...”

“... as for many upper-class Indians under British rule, if not accompanied by equality of opportunity, may foster a hostile nationalism. Anderson is sometimes led away by trivia, or by the desire to present a paradox. ‘There has not been an English dynasty ruling in London since the 11th century,’ he states: yet if we are to accept that migration to the United ...”

“... a radically one-sided commitment which cuts like a sword through any harmonious whole. The world may present itself as a seamless whole to the disinterested eye of reason, but faith is a matter of passion and the believer is someone in love. Theologically speaking, Kierkegaard is a fideist, holding that faith begins where reason leaves off. He does not see ...”

“... hurt. Keegan does something rare in creating archives of unhappiness, showing the way one sorrow may reverberate with another, how pressure can activate the pain of an old bruise. As a boy, short on Christmas gifts, Furlong had longed for a particular jigsaw puzzle, which had a picture of a farm. Instead he was given a nailbrush, a hot-water bottle and a ...”

“... the task of explaining why we are wrong to underestimate the power of British rain: why, though it may never inspire the immediate awe of a hurricane or a tornado or a Russian purga, it is worthy of respect and fear; and how, even as the mysterious forces of cultural evolution lead more urban Britons to wander about without umbrellas and rainwear, hoping that ...”