“... schools public schools and Mehta tells us why – which seems a bit much in a book published by John Murray. Christopher Hill – he of the little-finger handshake – is asked to explain the attractions of Marxism in the light of the Hungarian Revolution. Lord Oxmanton’s mother is asked to explain the rules and rituals of pheasant-shoots. Useful stuff if ...”

“... of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect Russell, Ayer, Popper etc; he neglects very little. Indeed the quantity of material he doesn’t neglect is impressively great: he comes near to being the ideal spectator of high-class contemporary trends. I feel that the introductory chapters are significantly ...”

“... Twenties he was appointed to a three-man RILU commission to China. His two companions were Earl Russell Browder, a young American Communist, and Jacques Doriot, one of the most popular Communist leaders in France. The three men were sent to ‘monitor’ the Chinese workers’ revolution, which had seized the centre of many of the big cities. The commission ...”

“... I can, why the insertion of the concept of temporal priority into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished Enquiries Concerning Human ...”

“... past, not of the yet-to-be-experienced future. It is the world of the past which constitutes what John Bowlby has called ‘the environment of adaptiveness’. And, as Alice discovered when she observed the croquet game in Wonderland, outside the environment of adaptiveness anything can happen. Examples abound, not merely in fantasies and ...”

“... that the owners of the Times could have done more to restrain Dawson from his excesses; as it was, John Walter IV, co-proprietor with Lord Astor, complained when ‘our leader-writer’ proposed dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His qualms were ‘airily’ brushed aside by Dawson. Half a century on, what of Rupert Murdoch? ‘Arguably,’ says Heren, ‘he ...”

“... arrival on the scene during the Crimean campaign of the Times’s correspondent, William Howard Russell, and the photographer Roger Fenton, the only alternative to accepting the official line was to go and see for yourself. Which is what many people did in 1815. As Hofschröer notes, by the time Siborne’s model went on show in 1838, most people already ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”

“... enterprise has not failed to show itself in the most favourable light. Thus in the Crimea Uncle John has carried his railroads with him, and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell and other implements of war … from the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports direct the state of the siege every few ...”

“... aren’t always distinguishable from those who proclaim the gospel of ‘The March of Mind’. John Elliotson, a professor at the University of London, wanted to improve the practice of medicine, but thought this could be done partly by the use of mesmerism, and was exposed in the Lancet as a fraud – or possibly a dupe – in 1838. The high-minded ...”

“... Novel without a Hero’ – when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer. ‘So much for the Dictionary,’ says Becky Sharp as the carriage pulls ...”

“... raises questions about the relationship between these two and their spouses, Vivien Haigh-Wood and John Middleton Murry.* Why was Eliot distrustful, and even apprehensive, of Mansfield? What was Murry’s relationship with Vivien – and indeed with Eliot himself? Why were Vivien’s feelings about Murry so tortured – and was Mansfield jealous of her? There ...”

“... stare – blue-grey, strabismic – dazzles in Colony of Ghosts (2023), painted after a photograph John Deakin took sixty years ago of the ‘School of London’ and Colony Room members Freud, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach together at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho. Paul wanted to conjure the power of that boys’ gang and express her own ...”

“... by one of the authors. One claim which the authors make most surely be discounted: that Pope John XXIII may have had connections with the Prieuré. While admitting that the claim is incapable of proof, they point, among other insubstantial considerations, to his lifting of the ban on Freemasonry. They assert that his Apostolic Letter of 1960 (the text of ...”

“... the range of their fears and excitements. Describing his rather tortured teenage life, Bertrand Russell’s autobiography stresses that while outwardly well-behaved, he ‘found living at home only endurable at the cost of complete silence about everything that interested me’. Barbara Wootton and her childhood friends went further, and fended off the ...”