“... 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 ...”

“... reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to ...”

“... English family life. For the first century at least, the main qualification for the task was to be a relative – Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), the Rev. J.E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) and W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913). These pioneers had two main ...”

“... It is also the chief protagonist of the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who by drawing our attention to this most underprivileged of Lacan’s three categories, challenges his fashionable image as a ‘post-structuralist’ thinker. Zizek’s Lacan is not the philosopher of the floating signifier but a much tougher, alarming, uncanny ...”

“... pessimism it has generated about the country’s prospects make this an unfortunate time to be reviewing two books with titles as upbeat as Rebirth of a Nation and Resurrection. Curiously, though, neither book has dated as much as one might have expected since the events of last August – which is to say that the crisis has told us little we did not ...”

“... an eccentric and a ‘character’, whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a connoisseur than Henry Irving, but who must have been a terrible father, particularly at moments when he took his parental duties with Calvinist solemnity. Patrick probably inherited a taste for drink and drama, a touch of Scottish diablerie with ...”

“... women who did things well ... women who counted and who would go on counting ... They might still be in the minority and yet they sprang up everywhere.’ This passage, with its untroubled description of lesbianism, is unusual in Hall’s fiction – although it is true that even these confident young women exist only to point up Joan’s own failure in this ...”

“... moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it. I want it to be a fort or an ancient lookout, in line with the crannog, the tiny island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone ...”

“... land of its fathers. The forest which will rise in his name in the Galilee will, I have no doubt, be a lasting symbol of friendship between Ireland and Israel. Many such messages were sent, and de Valera was ‘deeply grateful’. But there was something missing in the generous tributes and in the references to the great friendship between de Valera and ...”