“... the sixth move, different games start to move along different paths. The difference at this stage may be tiny – a bishop goes one square further – but the game may by that action be tilted towards a very different finale. The position of the pieces on the board after fifty moves is, in some sense, a consequence of what ...”

“... here – ‘entertain’ might be more appropriate. For Donoghue’s Stevens it is ‘as if’ I may entertain the fiction that it’s sunny outside when it’s raining; but exquisite as my conviction may be, I’m still getting wet. Then again, it’s ‘as if’ I’m really still dry. None of which seems to me to refute ...”

“... in common, is, we now realise, ‘constructed’, ‘a product of culture’. Take nakedness. One may doubt whether early modern English men and women were ever naked. In the mid-17th century Quakers went ‘naked for a sign’, but they often turn out to have been wearing sackcloth coats – ‘naked’ here means without shoes, hats or outer garments. Men ...”

“... group in Paris and some of their acquaintances. Seven meetings were held between January and early May 1928, five between November 1930 and August 1932. The first two reports were published at the time in La Révolution surréaliste; the other ten were unknown until a French edition edited by José Pierre appeared three years ago. This translation has an ...”

“... on. He had hoped that Wittgenstein would approve of what he had been writing, but when they met in May 1913, Wittgenstein told him that it was all wrong, and, as Russell admitted to Ottoline Morrell, he did not know how to answer Wittgenstein’s objections. He never published the whole of what he had written, and it is likely that what he did publish was the ...”

“... consumerism, an age whose dominant trope is anti-climax. ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’ may nonetheless seem to confirm the stock views of Marvell and Milton: Marvell stands apart from the sublime solemnity of his friend, ironically distancing himself from his achievements. According to T.S. Eliot, Milton’s Puritan republicanism destroyed his ...”

“... to a version of style that negates itself and calls itself Austerity. (The opening chapter of David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, 1945-51 is called ‘Waiting for Something to Happen’.) It can take a while for a decade to have a style. The 1950s, for example, weren’t really the 1950s until the 1960s so clearly turned out to be the 1960s.* We know ...”

“... and, like all such devices, ought to maintain constancy. But it is also part of nature and so it may be affected by the kind of inconstancy that it often claims to detect in the other part which it measures. Wittgenstein in some of his later work was concerned with a fundamental form of this problem. Do the meanings of our words remain stable and unchanged ...”

“... sounded good to her. She was envious of her clever only daughter and favoured her youngest child, David. One of Ethel’s childhood friends remembered that Tessie was ‘more bigoted than religious … If God had meant for Ethel to have music lessons, he would have provided them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the ...”

“... Some sixty years ago, when David Thomson was a boy, he suffered from a condition that badly affected his eyesight. He could see, but poorly. He read Braille and, though this was forbidden, the printed page. On two occasions, when the condition grew worse, he was condemned to spend six weeks at a time lying on his back in a darkened room ...”

“... visitors or foreign observers, is likely to be at least and at best partially valid, which may explain why the literature on London is so lush. By the late 18th century, it was the largest city in the world, unique not only in the number of its inhabitants, but also in the range of its functions. Pace Dr Johnson, there was not in London all that life ...”

“... of air power was to ‘attack the will of the enemy’s people’. ‘Whatever the civilian may desire or squeak for, to put it vulgarly, in the next great war he is going to be “in the soup”, and what kind of soup will it be? A pretty hot one!’ It could plausibly be argued that the readiness of British statesmen to allow the dismemberment of ...”

“... of Josef Albers shows bias. The exclusion of Mark di Suvero means the omission of the one artist (David Smith is something else) who has created a sculptural equivalent of Abstract Expressionism, the movement which forms the nucleus of the exhibition. The exclusion of Chuck Close, accompanied by the inclusion of three large works by Jonathan Borofsky, can ...”

“... an autobiography, or as giving the whole story. Regard it as pointing a way out of the woods that may only take us deeper into them. It provides lyrics, no matter that Sondheim admits to enjoying the music more. As any admirer knows, his gift is the unmatched dance of music and lyrics, the nearly stammered wordsmith skill that he calls ordinary ...”

“... monarchical society into a democratic one unlike any that had ever existed’, though even this may underestimate its constitutional legacy. The United States resolved ancient political conundrums that still bedevil European and British politics, problems such as federal government, divided sovereignty, democratic rule over an extended territory and the ...”