“... 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 ...”

“... by his English publishers as his ‘long-awaited magnum opus’. Hazardous, therefore, as it may be to try to assess the significance of so prolific an author on the strength of a single volume which is only the half of a two-part work, the attempt has to be made as best it can. Is this the distillation of a theory both original and profound? Or the ...”

“... Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely ...”

“... he needed, on the brink of manhood, was a symbolic reminder of her domestic omnipotence. Preminger may not move on the exalted literary plane of Edmund Gosse, but the impulse behind his book is not dissimilar to that which gave rise to Father and Son. Gypsy and Me absolutely had to be written, ostensibly as a tribute to a remarkable woman, but more importantly ...”

“... were somewhat different. Unless one is knowledgeable about such technological history, one may be surprised, too, to find that Sassoon’s car did 50 miles to the gallon. Of somewhat wider historical interest is the fact – which everyone knows in general but which it is more difficult to imagine concretely – that one could then quite unremarkably ...”

“... reason and feeling coincide. In this part of his lectures he is profoundly opposed to Hume. (We may note that Madison did not recommend either Hume’s Treatise or the Enquiries to the Library of Congress.) Witherspoon’s positive doctrine combined, without his apparently ever noticing the tension between them, a version of Hutcheson’s moral sense theory ...”

“... ones best account for the facts. Here false conclusions have no uniform origin, and a steady mind may not suffice to discover the truth. The first tier constrains one to interpreting language and thought along Fregean lines, in terms of senses of words which allow one to use them to refer to things. Dummett’s greatest ire is reserved for those ...”

“... training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ... that they may be the better assisted in the study of the liberal arts and the cultivation of virtue and religion’. R.B. McDowell and D.A. Webb have written the history of that bizarre institution, Trinity College, from 1592 to 1952, the year in which Provost McConnell ...”

“... us to distinguish between a compelling synthesis and an irresponsible innuendo, things which may not look very different – especially since the strength and value of the device will lie in its tactful equivocation between enforced analogy and accidental discovery. In the case of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter our criterion is generally satisfied: the ...”

“... can be constructed which is fully compatible with the non-Lamarckian nature of inheritance. This may be so, but it is not the point. It is always possible, after the event, to argue that a correct application of some philosophy would have led to the right solution. Unfortunately, when the issue was still open, most Marxists were not on the side of the ...”

“... much now to you – as I am writing in Horne’s office (Horne of the ‘Hobbey Horse’). He may be hear any time – I have been busy these last two days making up material in the British Museum reading room for a story about Father John O Hart. Horne has just come in and tells me that your poem will be in next ‘Hobby Horse’ – I was at the ...”