“... the wall which I’m currently engaged on, is to be able to visit Cornelissen’s shop in Great Russell Street, which sells all manner of paints and colours and where I go this morning in order to find some varnish to seal the surface of the plaster. After I’d finished putting on all the greenish-yellow colour yesterday I did some trial patches of varnish ...”

“... were alone in the coffee shop. They had the matched look of actresses in a Forties film, Jane Russell and Jane Wyman, or Joan Crawford and Joan Fontaine. It was clear that Anne – drinking a martini, talking too loud – was the bad girl, and that Maxine was taking anxious care of her. It had been a difficult year. Anne’s divorce from Kayo Sexton, the ...”

“... rather casually: I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear ...”

“... only one apiece. Firth, Halliday, Pike, Lamb, Guillaume, Lévi-Strauss, Frege, Cassirer, Quine, Russell and Freud fail to score at all. Thus to anyone who is not a beginner and cares to glance first at the Index, it will come as no surprise to find that whereas Professor Lyons has a great deal to say in his book about phonemes and morphemes, he has ...”

“... huge inverted commas. Everything in Cloud Atlas seems nicked: the post-apocalyptic world from Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the political ideas from Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. As a result it’s far too cartoonish and second-hand to have any real bite: it’s like looking into a snowglobe for a deep moral message. Like Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s ...”

“... on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations ...”

“... If Robespierre could have read the second volume of John Ehrman’s massive biography of Pitt it would have saved him a good deal of worry. The two men had more in common than might appear at first sight, or than either of them would have cared to admit. Each was a decidedly cold fish, a bachelor of that alarming species that lives only for politics ...”

“... A relief, then, to turn from all this deranged big-talk to some sturdy English self-effacement. John Haffenden is steadily becoming the closest we have to a domestic version of the Mansos and Grobels. He has already published a book of earnest conversations with a dozen or so poets and this month he gives it a companion: Novelists in Interview.2 Plodding ...”

“... tracts of time that might otherwise get colonised by anxious thought. And who wants that? Bertrand Russell said that people will do almost anything rather than think. Despite one’s best efforts, though, thoughts still sometimes come. Then, as Beckett says elsewhere, thinking can do proleptic duty, ensuring that rogue thoughts are repeated over and ...”

“... striking attitudes with the duff public art we passed along the way. Our most love to loathe is John Ravera’s In Town, an anodised couple chucking their malshapen baby between them, which stands at the southern end of Battersea Bridge. We stopped at a vintage comic store in Putney where the proprietor, although a ringer for Comic Book Guy in The ...”

“... more available on tseliot.com, and many thousands yet to come. Edited for the most part by John Haffenden, the edition builds on the collection made by the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print ...”

“... class altogether’. But the middle class, under another name, is in again these days. Conrad Russell, Hexter’s successor at Yale and no friend of loose generalisation, has recently envisaged ‘a new social change explanation’ of the English Civil War, based on the power of the rising yeomanry, tradesmen and artificers. I think he is right: I am sure ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... be lost if we went all the way with Derrida and Foucault, Wordsworth is more useful than Mill or Russell, Rilke more useful than Aristotle or Hegel. And he is certainly right that ‘when Wordsworth and Hölderlin describe the natural world around us, they no longer play on an established gamut of references, as Pope could still do in Windsor Forest. They ...”

“... are also more than usually absurd. Look at those silly clips of Paddy Ashdown playing hopscotch or John Major on his knees in a day-nursery or Tony Blair in his Newcastle soccer-strip. Who do these people think they’re fooling? Why don’t they treat us as grown-ups? What’s happened to the issues? To this, the politicians might retort: where did those ...”