“... It is very provoking of W.J. McCormack to write in this benighted way. The less he has to say, the more fussy and fustian his manner becomes. On the poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, we get this: The title employs words, not numerals, but it employs one of several possible verbal formulations. It prevents us from particularising the year as One ...”

“... skits, squibs, facetious or satirical articles, jokes, paid for at space rates. Such a poet as Thomas Hood had already squeezed a precarious living from writing or editing ‘comic annuals’, and Punch and its imitators bought the work of innumerable freelances whose hunger enabled them to summon up humour on demand. A third possible source of income was ...”

“... do the state some service’ by ‘helping the present and future generations to realise more thoroughly than were otherwise possible the character of their ancestors’ collective achievement, of which they now enjoy the fruits’. Furthermore, the DNB was a monument to entrepreneurial zeal. Elsewhere, similar schemes were often state-aided ...”

“... the Supreme Court whose rejection by the Senate resulted instead in the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Although legal literalism can crop up almost anywhere, its sharpest American manifestation, ‘originalism’, is a stalking-horse for a movement which wants to see a number of the Supreme Court’s most controversial modern decisions – those on ...”

“... wits about us. The first two epigraphs to the book are plain sentences from the American novelists Thomas McGuane and John O’Hara about how we judge ourselves and others. The third epigraph is a sentence from Hamlet: ‘From the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and ...”

“... trunked and bikinied masses. ‘Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1784). In the election of October 1974, Wilson got a bare majority, with 319 seats, but still lacked a clear mandate. Yet the country, it turned out, was less divided than it appeared. In 1975 there was a referendum on continuing membership ...”

“... creates a blind spot in political discourse. The parallels between Plotinus and Lacan are probably more than fortuitous. Lacan’s theory developed in the early 1930s through the synthesis of his teacher Henri Wallon’s ‘mirror test’ with some of the ideas he was picking up from his informal philosophical studies. At the time, Neoplatonism was also ...”

“... a strange reversal came about: rich people got thinner, poor people got fatter, rich people gave more of themselves to work, poor people gave more of themselves to leisure, and it was thought almost holy that Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans ...”

“... with a luxuriant blond soup-strainer moustache, a rubicund complexion, a large mouth from which more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the ...”

“... reflections show the openness of the rationalist to a wider stream of Enlightenment thought, a more capacious conception of mind and cosmos (and the relationship between them) that can be found in thinkers from Isaac Newton and John Locke to Adam Smith and David Hume. What Kind of Creatures Are We? reprints a series of lectures Chomsky delivered at ...”

“... argued that African Americans – ‘especially if we are potential writers’ – may be ‘more than ordinarily concerned’ with the associations their names carry with them.Everett was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. He studied with the logician Howard Pospesel at the University of Miami, where he read Frege, Wittgenstein and ...”

“... mentions them only in brief asides about Poets’ Corner and a couple of Tudor tombs. And what is more superannuated, more artistically mute and inexpressive, more absurdly camp, than a white marble statue of an old dead dude, surrounded by endless allegorical ladies? How many people have ...”

“... with characteristically skilful quotations, the ambivalence that Europeans felt as they became more conscious of the existence of powerful rivals. With Pietro della Valle, struck by the sharp contrast between the hurried movements and prissy status displays of European grandees and the silent dignity of the Turks, or Alessandro Valignano, impressed that ...”

“... the other, and in Borges we witness the death of the author from the author’s point of view. Or more precisely the lapse of the person into the author, the birth of the textual play actor at the expense of the mere civilian, who becomes nameless, like the historical Perón and Eva once politics and mythology take them up. But again, it’s not exactly fame ...”

“... so profitably on this topic have a secure or comprehensive understanding of the past – any more than many historians do. Too often the impression has been fostered that empire was a uniquely European invention which became significant only in the last two centuries. That European overseas empires (depending on how one defines them) date back rather to ...”