“... restless compatriots with a coherent ideology and politics of anticolonial nationalism. In Christopher de Bellaigue’s politically astute biography, Mossadegh is not the ‘dizzy old wizard’ and ‘tantrum-throwing Scheherazade’ of countless Anglo-American memoirs and press reports, but a member of ‘that generation of Western-educated Asians who ...”

“... philosophers) reads (Anglophone, analytic) philosophy these days. But, having just worked through Christopher Hughes’s Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, I am no longer puzzled. That may sound as though I’m intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it’s a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well ...”

“... could tell he had some talent,’ the head coach, Madeleine Barlocher, told his biographer Christopher Clarey, ‘but I had a good group with a lot of young boys with talent … I would never have guessed he would become what he would become.’ The opening chapters of The Master, Clarey’s book on Federer, are full of cautious early assessments of ...”

“... by the King James. Bishop Robert Lowth explained it in detail in 1753 in Oxford, and inspired Christopher Smart, who attended the lectures, to use the form for his Jubilate Agno. Alter emphasises this by splitting each line into two, with the second one indented, giving the poem a more ‘modern’ look, but it is hard to see why this is ‘more ...”

“... at the Met and concerts at Carnegie Hall, but arranged to pay him a monthly stipend of $150 in the hope that he would write a novel consonant with her vision of Black primitivism. Not long after, however, Mason offered a similar contract to Hurston (though her stipend was $200), and she and Hughes now found themselves jousting for the approval of ...”

“... a Dreyfusard, for quarrelling, at the cost of his job, with other liberal-socialist Dreyfusards. Christopher Norris, in a page devoted to this curious essay, remarks that ‘any mention of the Dreyfus affair must of course raise the question of anti-semitism,’ but fails to add that de Man’s mention of it rather pointedly did not; Derrida likewise omits ...”

“... doesn’t the audience will feel cheated. ‘I bet you’ve found faith now,’ believers wrote to Christopher Hitchens when he announced he had terminal cancer. He insisted he hadn’t. I’d never been envious of those who believe in an afterlife until now. It would be so much cosier than dissolution. She’s gone to the next room. Nope, can’t manage ...”

“... read Hans Keller, his analysis of a Haydn quartet puts names and dockets on relationships we might hope to apprehend by our own cruder mechanisms. On the other hand, a richly fraught historical survey gives us new ears to piece out the meaning of the music. Whatever the truth of this, the huge distinction of Wind’s brand of art history survives all the ...”

“... it an interpretative science. Interpreters look at the sparkling surface of Plato’s text in the hope of gauging the depth and the movement of the waters beneath. The hermeneutical philosopher looks at the surface in order to contemplate the reflection of his own more lovely features. Perhaps this explains why Gadamer’s portraits of Plato and Aristotle ...”

“... that the sexes are identical. In the film of Henry James’s The Bostonians, Superman-star Christopher Reeves looks deeply into the eyes of the suffragette heroine and drawls, ‘Yo’re made for prah-vacy,’ and she is convinced. She opts for a world of personal value. The real-life case of Gertrude Stein was somewhat different. With only one ...”

“... presence of two anti-boy women ... complicated the atmosphere, because Benjamin likes to be with Christopher and Wystan, all boys together without disturbing foreign elements such as slightly hostile ladies and gentlemen hostile to gay music.’ Pears sang a song which Britten had made from one of Spender’s poems, ‘a very Stephenish one full of slightly ...”

“... Scholar, was spending the summer tramping around France and Italy with a recently made friend, Christopher Middleton. They had only two books with them, a collection of Donne’s poems and Pound’s Cantos. ‘Neither of us, I think, had much notion as to what the long poem was about,’ Davenport remembered, ‘except that it had strangeness and beauty in ...”

“... treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great magazines – as a friend of ‘Christopher North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh ...”

“... elements – a letter to the author’s father, reminiscences of a dead sister, chats with Christopher Hitchens, tales of Oxford and the old New Statesman office, and so on. But fierce reading is what this book is about, and these other passages seem intrusive. It would have been enough to observe a good writer wrestling with material that clearly ...”

“... years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is still ...”