“... cross old Peggotty’s arm – and she died like a child that had gone to sleep!’ Clara’s son David, his retrospective narrative voice moving between the worlds of service and gentility, speaks for Dickens in musing on the socially ambitious Em’ly: ‘I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters ...”

“... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...”

“... who wrote nothing, was prosecuted for impiety, or when Spinoza was excommunicated, or when David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature ‘fell dead-born from the press’. Kitcher’s ‘growing conviction that contemporary Anglophone philosophy has lost its audience’ suggests that he is thinking instead of the recent past. ‘Indeed, as I look back to ...”

“... Divorcing was reissued by New York Review Books in 2020 with an introduction by Sontag’s son, David Rieff. Lament for Julia is now available for the first time, along with nine of her short stories. Taubes’s fiction is autobiographical. She writes female protagonists who are daughters of psychoanalysts or trapped in fluorescently unhappy marriages or ...”

“... from the tradition of teaching rhetoric and oratory in the antebellum college. Oratory may have seemed relevant to the later careers of the small social elite who attended the old colleges, but writing was the more necessary skill for the vastly expanded number being disgorged from universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The history ...”

“... will, summed up by the authors as ‘democracy’. Readers are warned that the book’s argument may not be ‘immediately clear’ and are exhorted to be patient, for Multitude is ‘a mosaic from which the general design gradually emerges’. Before turning to that design, it’s important to stress how welcome this expansiveness is. In a venture like ...”

“... harbour. Tears of joy? Relief? Despair? The book he is reportedly writing in his French retreat may tell us; meanwhile we can only guess. The peaceful transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from Britain to China – all things considered, the unlikeliest end any empire ever had – went off without a visible hitch. Almost every day of his five-year ...”

“... real luxuries, offered only to a select and well-paid few, were priced absurdly low.) Prokofiev may later have regretted this decision: good apartments were in very short supply in Moscow, and he never got one he really liked. Now came the challenge of becoming a Soviet composer. Apolitical as he was, Prokofiev nevertheless seems genuinely to have welcomed ...”

“... Back​ in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...”

“... is not and has never been humanly feasible.’ ‘At home – chez soi – one is a potentate; one may grant an outsider relief from the outside; and this must be what I yearn for.’ ‘I think that what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with.’ Plus, despite his failure to reproduce with Jenn, ‘I have always wanted ...”

“... so that we can learn lessons’.* It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking the moment when the UK fell off its global perch, trust in government collapsed and the country turned inward and began to disintegrate. When the report was published I was outside the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the shadow of ...”

“... journals have to be printed and distributed. Peer reviewers and the editorial boards of journals may not be paid, but designers, typesetters and copy editors are. Elsevier, the world’s biggest publisher of journals, employs 16,000 editors. Still, no matter how generously you spin it, the numbers tell their own story: in 2015, Elsevier reported profits of ...”

“... all these files contain secret portraits: women or men seen as others see them. These portraits may be the result of years of painstaking, insanely minute watching and eavesdropping by one or several security teams. Almost always, much of their detail comes from informers. Some informers won’t be identifiable. Some ...”

“... eight years after the publication of the Life and 24 years after The Garden and the City, he may be said to have made his major contribution. Rogers’s claim to the succession, if it is a claim, cannot be thought audacious or premature. After more than a century of scholarly neglect, Pope enjoyed considerable attention during the ascendancy of the New ...”

“... which had two interdependent components. The first was monetarism. Lawson is not afraid to quote David Hume in asserting the fundamental relation between the quantity of money in circulation and the level of prices in the economy as a whole. He tells us that he was converted by the accelerating rate of price increases in the late Sixties and early Seventies ...”