“... much as to say that, over the centuries, the common reader, who (it is a hundred to one) has never read the Farther Adventures, has not been in a position to appreciate Robinson Crusoe. A more plausible ethical interpretation is proposed by Laura Curtis in The Elusive Daniel Defoe. It is that we are to relate the island life constructed by Robinson Crusoe to ...”

“... order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been ...”

“... we that love her so much? These questions rise and fall like the sound of distant applause as you read the Christie’s catalogue. And occasional answers can seem to spring from the pictures and descriptions of the objects themselves. The book is a slick and a morbid affair: the clothes are really nothing without Marilyn in them; many of the photographs show ...”

“... ignorant verve he wanted as a painter and that he strove to portray in person. He knew and had read plenty, but preferred to play the innocent, the observant but befuddled immigrant who could manifest his naivety in the act of denying it: ‘I’m not a – how do you say that? – country dumpling.’ Among the most suggestive aspects of Krauss’s ...”

“... agonise about their great texts being predominantly Anglo-European.) Can an African-American read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a ‘great book’ and nothing more? There was much agitation. Banners were unfurled (mainly for the benefit of the press) proclaiming ‘Get your racist education at Stanford.’ The acronym DWEM (dead white European ...”

“... with a marvellous world of concealment, the possibility of a second existence.’ Much later we read: ‘Everything seemed to indicate that Jaromil’s enormous yearning for newness (the religion of the New) was only the disguised longing of a virginal youth for the unimaginable experience of the sex act. When he first reached the blissful shore of the ...”

“... from the upstairs window of a house overlooking the site, issued a warrant for Hunt’s arrest and read the Riot Act, though it is unlikely that anyone heard them. Shortly after the meeting started at one o’clock, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry (consisting of volunteers recruited from local publicans and shopkeepers) charged into the ...”

“... how the Paras’ reputation fell further during the rest of the 1970s. ‘Paras = evil bastards’ read one piece of graffiti in Belfast; at the same time, dozens of these supposedly elite soldiers were killed in IRA ambushes. In 1977 – because of defence cuts, and because of their unpopularity with the rest of the army – the Paras were reduced to three ...”

“... in fact, since there seems to be nothing that this formidably erudite historian has not read. Just as the concept of experience seems to cover everything, so Jay’s intellectual landscape is innocent of frontiers between art and sociology, philosophy and political theory. Specialism, fragmentation and the division of labour have often enough been ...”

“... should be represented, whether by loan or by purchase, was drawn up by her chief adviser, Herbert Read. According to Guggenheim, it was later revised by ‘Marcel Duchamp, Nelly van Doesburg and myself because it contained so many mistakes’. Works by many of the artists on the list were acquired in Paris just before the outbreak of the Second World ...”

“... with the Black Mountain school, an identification sealed by her inclusion under that heading in Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology The New American Poetry. The lone woman in a lupine contingent, she was glad to make common cause against the so-called ‘closed’ poetics of Eliot and his successors, but her experimental sympathies stopped there. At a time when ...”

“... listening to the murmur of the artificial stream and imagining myself knee-deep in a real one, I read that Pornhub, as its answer to the Covid-19 crisis, was offering its lubricious content free to the over-sixties. Right age, I thought, wrong offer. Fishing videos are my porn: all those voluptuous, writhing, saftig trout, the babes of the fast water ...”

“... Soviet Union, or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, appears to be unavailable to the Scots. I met or read no one who appealed to ethnicity: not surprisingly, since Scotland has been ethnically mixed up for centuries; no one who appealed to religion (Scotland’s most vigorous religion is Catholicism and the churches of its official religion are badly ...”

“... and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has read widely and deeply in Hegel – not for some of us the most enthralling way of passing the time – and has a daunting command of the field of modern European political thought. Currently professor of the history of political thought at Cambridge, he started ...”

“... and innuendo. His main characteristic was cynicism. And yet his friends included Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Norman Mailer, Barbara Walters (they almost married), Cardinal Spellman, nearly all the top Mafia people, Richard Nixon, Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, William F. Buckley, an endless list of Congressmen and judges and ...”