“... Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way. There is, for starters, George’s younger ...”

“... A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had their revenge. Wertham is ...”

“... Never trust the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work ...”

“... the world as it existed, without the comforting delusion that answers to every problem could be found by sifting through the sacred texts time and again. ‘Everything remains to be done,’ Sartre insisted. ‘We must find the method and constitute the science.’ This science would ...”

“... which are remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George Bernard Shaw. The Yale Book lists these under the names of their authors, along with brief indications of their provenance and reliability. Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you ...”

“... a lot of metal to clean. The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its ...”

“... into this world, they could put a royal gloss on the ruthless business of economic imperialism by coaxing or browbeating indigenous rulers into bargaining away their sovereignty. For minor kings and junior dynasts especially, the extra-European world was a place to amass wealth or responsibilities denied them at home. But they didn’t get to perform these ...”

“... keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan. Reg was nicely cased in a blue three-piece by Woods of Kingsland Road. Dickie matched him. (The Twins were very influential that way. All the faces were expected to dress to a middle-management standard.) Reg was, as Tony acknowledges, ‘one of the smartest men London ever turned out’. But Ron, the ...”

“... in problems so deep you could hardly breathe. Superficiality was the great danger; nothing could be achieved without struggle, either in approaching the problems or in understanding what Wittgenstein said. Above all, there was the sense that it was almost impossibly difficult to express the truth – witness Wittgenstein’s own failure to publish all but a ...”

“... of post-Rylean anti-Cartesians in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and ...”

“... in which we think James Bond is such a good name for a spy because that’s what we know it to be? The answer to all these questions is probably yes, which means that however fascinating literary names are as a subject it’s extremely hard to write a book about them. If there are general principles to literary naming, and yet everybody does it ...”

“... in the light of evolution.’ That is the title of a spirited 1973 polemic against creationism by one of the great evolutionary geneticists, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-75). The maxim suggests two ways of thinking about brains. One is implied directly: start at the beginning of life itself, tracing the appearance of more and more complex living ...”

“... his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with David McDuff’s new translation of The Idiot and some other holiday books. When I say I want to write about Himself Alone, he exclaims: ‘A thick brick like that! I ...”

“... in which she tried to establish ‘a method for discovering one’s true likes and dislikes’ by noting down ‘what kinds of experience made me happy’. The method was: (a) to pick out those moments in my daily life which had been particularly happy and to try to record them in words. (b) To go over these records in order to see whether I could ...”

“... Tolstoy found that the ‘dialogues are impossible and entirely unnatural … I was surprised by his sloppiness, artificiality … so awkward … outright unartistic.’ Nabokov used it as an example of bad style: ‘Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humour, but, alas, with wastelands of literary ...”