“... about the role of rape in our culture. Both present America in a state of crisis. William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas are just the tip of the iceberg; the statistics are horrific. Rape is increasing four times faster than any other crime. Anywhere from 20 to 44 per cent of girls in their early teens can expect to suffer rape or attempted ...”

“... of moral critics like F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling virtually disappeared in the Sixties. Richard Rorty speaks of ‘the current struggle in American literary circles between ... old-fashioned storytelling novelists and ironist critics’ as ‘a symptom of the inability of intellectuals to take such novels seriously as moral testimonies’. If one ...”

“... of Charles Hamilton and his works that Coker was derived in part from Hamilton’s elder brother Richard, whose Christian name provided the famous pseudonym, and who, quite clearly, was anything but a lout in the eyes of the author. And there’s a Cliff House character named Dolly whom Drotner persists in calling Jolly, as though to superimpose mood over ...”

“... Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the original Labour moderniser,’ the blurb begins. With Labour under Blair mobilising ...”

“... for it is all that remains of the unpublished work. Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. She married at the age of 19, divorced, and some turbulent years later remarried the charming, handsome, emotionally unstable and fatally alcoholic bisexual, Reeves McCullers, who committed suicide in 1953, having failed to ...”

“... or historical works on the nature of property rights published in the last few decades: Richard Schlatter’s Private Property: The History of an Idea, C.B. Macpherson’s more incautious The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Robert Nozick’s notorious Anarchy, State and Utopia and Lawrence Becker’s modest text on Property Rights. But ...”

“... podium’, but he was prepared to give the Hitler salute. A long-standing friend of Gadamer’s, Richard Kroner, taught philosophy at Kiel. In 1934, Gadamer reports, ‘fate intervened to throw Kroner off track’: that is to say, Kroner was sacked because he was a Jew. Gadamer took his job. Despite this little success, further balancing acts were still ...”

“... be something in philosophy that counts as ‘getting it right’. In this, it properly rejects Richard Rorty’s model for the future of philosophy (or rather, as he sees it, of what used to be philosophy), the model of a conversation. Unless a conversation is very relentless – for instance, one between philosophers – it will not be held together by ...”

“... The 18th-century forebears of utilitarianism and classical political economy like Hume and Adam Smith had doubted that we could understand much about other people, but didn’t think that that mattered much. Common psychological characteristics could be assumed, and social conventions and rules of exchange would serve to co-ordinate human behaviour and ...”

“... to the masculine canon was a drawing, a doodle really, by Dorothy, Lady Burlington, the wife of Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, a great patron of art and architecture to whom Pope dedicated the last of his Moral Essays. Lady Burlington sketched Pope at a game of cards – perhaps ombre (aptly enough, an Englishing of the Spanish for ‘man’), the game ...”

“... turned, from which some semblance of pre-modern Gemeinschaft might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam ...”

“... such was the passion for it that, from Edward II on, English kings tried to ban it. Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV all passed edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal ...”

“... this. The opium trade, they believed, demeaned and disgraced the whole enterprise. The Radical Richard Cobden thought it showed the British up as ‘bullies’ and ‘cowards’. The imperialist Lord Elgin claimed it revealed ‘how hollow and superficial’ were ‘both their civilisation and their Christianity’. Gladstone thought it ‘covered this ...”

“... and he went out of his way to get it. He had read the novel The Brick Foxhole by his friend Richard Brooks, and his memories of Camp Pendleton, where he had served as a drill sergeant in 1944 and 1945, brought the character close to home. ‘I know that son of a bitch,’ he said of the brutal anti-Semite in the script, named Montgomery. ‘No one knows ...”

“... apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I heard Alexander McCall Smith, a writer of feel-good detective novels, tell an interviewer how his work comes to him through his ‘unconscious’: plots, characters, everything bubbles up from the murky depths and tells him its story. He just types it out. Now this I envy. My ...”