“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and provides a series of enlightening close readings of the text. Concentration on the satires may prove in the long run to be misleading, but it is useful in establishing Rochester’s breadth of allusion and subject. Part of the process of ‘placing’ Rochester is the exposure of his philosophical origins. It is clear that Hobbes influenced him, but ...”

“... him as a Roman Catholic pacifist, a Nobel Prizeman speaking measured words to young idealists. We may have forgotten the work of his youth, the two post-war novels based on his experience of service with the German Army in Russia. The 22 stories in The Casualty were written in the immediately post-war period, 1946 to 1952, so that they are ...”

“... separate world of art? It seems likely that Amis has done something which in terms of the novel may be more difficult, and that is to carry the reader with him into whatever new places his interests or imagination have led him. Rather than making a separate world, he devotes his energies to persuading us to join him in his own. Traditionally this kind of ...”

“... could also be counter-productive militarily. It failed to force the Leningraders to surrender, and may even have stiffened their resistance: they knew that if they surrendered they would be starved all the same. As the besieging Quartermaster-General Wagner put it: ‘What are we supposed to do with a city of three and a half million which just rests itself on ...”

“... art, of course, depicts nudes. The Hepburn-like (or horrible-troll-like) naked body, though, may or may not be beautiful. He or she is real. He or she does return the viewer’s gaze. He or she is an active subject of desire – as well as of everything else, to quote Nietzsche, that’s ‘human, all too human’. And ...”

“... looks ‘pregnant’. (Whatever cluster of powers, dangers, potentialities, causes and effects may have been gathered up, for the image-maker and his audience, in a notion even roughly equivalent to the question-begging word ‘pregnancy’ is of course a matter of speculation. The archaeologists admit they haven’t much clue.) The sculptor seems to have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his accounts of hiking into the jungle interior of Trinidad in the search for guppy pools – that may deter many evolutionists. Fortunately, it is possible to approach the question of determinism in the lab, as long as you exercise some ingenuity – and choose the right organism. The Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Hans Krebs once told me that for every ...”

“... 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 ...”