“... 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 ...”

“... dose of romanticism. The young men who donned red shirts and joined Garibaldi’s expedition in May 1860 had heads full of poetry, Classical mythology and Verdi’s music. Giuseppe Cesare Abba, 21 when he sailed with ‘The Thousand’, has left a record of his exalted state of mind not only during the voyage but during the entire campaign – an exaltation ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh never wanted to be a writer, still less a novelist. That may explain both the weakness of his books and their remarkable and continuing popularity. Readers love an amateur with no intellectual pretensions – one of themselves, in fact – who is also an expert craftsman: and Waugh’s novels are as solidly made as the best furniture ...”

“... Such a tendency will not be confined, I believe, to the other side of the Irish Sea. In future, we may need to distinguish Modern English literature, a Romantic offshoot of the same type and vintage as Irish, Scottish and American literature, from an older English literature as well as from the generic subject of Literature in English. In other words, the ...”

“... Film Censorship is a splendid state document and worthy of its difficult subject.* This reviewer may take pride in the fact that the report bears the marks of having been in part written by, and supervised by, a philosopher, the chairman of the Committee, Bernard Williams. Philosophy does many things, some plainly useful and some rather remote from common ...”

“... The story is simple but compelling. Indeed, it may well be called ‘prodigious’, a term which is prominent on the title-page of the account of the case published in 1561. Martin Guerre was a peasant, of Basque origin but settled in the village of Artigat in the French South-West, between Toulouse and Foix. He married a local girl, Bertrande de Rols, when they were in their early teens; ten years later, he disappeared ...”