“... another magus, Robert Graves, the feminine for Redgrove is a source of spiritual energy which men may tap for their own health, and he advocates a form of material mysticism mediated through female bodies. But there’s something rather creepy about his enthusiasm. His version of the Grimms’ Cinderella, Ashiepaddle, shows her as a white witch, who has ...”

“... into stillness again.The doubling of consciousness, in which the figure straying across the field may be no more than a figment of the figure hunched at the table – the mind observing itself, in the third person, in the act of imagining – is present in most of Beckett’s later prose texts. So is the contrast between inner and outer, between the confined ...”

“... is with the working life of shoelaces and the rival hypotheses (there are two contenders) which may be adduced to explain not only how they come to break but also how one shoelace will snap within days of the other. This is the argumentative mainstream, into which, however, flow frequent tributaries in the form of disquisitions on ...”

“... have argued – persuasively, in my view – that the traditional check-list of Defoe’s output may considerably exaggerate the number of items written by him. Backscheider appears unhappy at this revisionist attempt to cut her author down to size. Her prefatory note that ‘my own use of the received canon is conservative’ is itself ambiguous. It appears ...”

“... to interracial accommodation Britain still has to travel. A major theme is racial attacks, which may be seen as the most serious threat to contemporary urban race relations. Not that they are of very recent origin. As Pilkington makes clear, they have been part of the experience of black people in Britain throughout most of the post-war period. Others have ...”

“... with the resulting civilian death toll ‘conservatively estimated’ at 100,000. These figures may have come as an embarrassment to the editors of the Salisbury Review, who in 1987 published an inexcusable defence of Renamo by Jillian Becker. They may even have made the State Department sit up. While it has shrewdly ...”

“... writes, ‘are the same roots as those of the phenomenological school.’ The two traditions ‘may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow to different seas.’ The Rhine is Frege and the Danube Husserl, and the ...”

“... and an index, though a list of illustrations and their sources is lacking. Simplistic as it may seem, we are still tempted to see the story of the Soviet theatre before 1933 in terms of the rival approaches, ambitions and successes of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, the two great innovators of the prerevolutionary Moscow theatre of whom the one was in due ...”

“... in order to take in the food that I see in the centre, and, at an earlier stage, some other sense may have told me which way to go in order to get into the position to eat. Our philosophical tradition is a very theoretical one and it is easy for us to forget how much our own actions contribute to the picture of the world around us. We think of the world as ...”

“... respectively. Pears’s own lecture courses at Oxford and UCLA (from which this book is drawn) may have followed this pattern, but he encourages continuity. He is not one to say, with Mr Bryan Magee in his recent BBC series The Great Philosophers,* that ‘since Wittgenstein repudiated his own early philosophy, and since in any case it is now his later ...”

“... there is almost no chance of your becoming a pathological fugueur. Our modern psychiatric bibles may still make room for the diagnosis of ‘dissociative fugue’, but there is no longer, in late 20th-century Europe, any ground on which that illness could truly thrive. A century ago it was different. Hacking is more precise (or peremptory): fugue, he ...”

“... up front to those of us who would like to treat Hobbes as a modern rational choice theorist. We may be interested in game-theoretic models of social contract among self-interested rational agents, says Skinner, but it’s wrong to assume that Hobbes was, or to assume he was simply because some of his vocabulary matches our vocabulary, without considering ...”

“... Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom Nairn did and felt on the unforgettable rainy Thursday of 6 May 1999. It was the first polling day for the reconvened Scottish Parliament. As Nairn drove back from Fife, where he had gone to say goodbye to a dying friend, he passed through some shaggy badlands country and was reminded of Dunn’s Among bracken, in his ...”

“... like how thinking relates to talking and feeling. A second is that whether an animal can think may depend a lot on what it is trying to think about. Budiansky’s alertness to this point is perhaps what is best in his book. It seems increasingly clear that a lot of our intellectual capacity is, as one says these days, ‘modularised’; it recruits ...”

“... Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been meant only metaphorically, but another is specific enough: ‘Biography is by nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all things: especially biography of distinguished individuals.’ Carlyle’s principles were more ...”