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“... after birth, some could stay there for decades, even for the rest of my life. These foetal cells may even sense the tissues around them and develop into the same types of cell, becoming an integral part of my body, which may have both positive and negative effects on my health – a sort of backwards inheritance. Foetal ...”

“... smuggling drugs. The Czechoslovak authorities who arrested Derrida this January on the same charge may have been repeating the classic mistake of metaphysics by taking language as reality. Although having risked imprisonment in the name of the free discussion of philosophy certainly makes Derrida a political hero, it still will not make him a philosophical ...”

“... number of times in which I was entirely stumped for anything to say. Until the last few weeks I may have been the only person who, if given a word-association test for ‘Hitler’, might well have exclaimed: ‘Iraq!’ So naturally I bristled like a retriever when George Bush began to compare Saddam Hussein with the leader of the Third Reich. Of ...”

“... thing, even in their own case, as integrity, or essence, or identity. These are ideal notions we may yearn after but which we cannot, in all honesty, attain to: Derrida is philosophy’s strict if good-humoured superego, barring the way to the deceptive satisfactions of a simple monism. In full deconstructive flow he is an exciting beater of the cognitive ...”

“... embarrassments of liberalism, and so little about conclusions liberals might establish? One answer may lie in a move made by the editors in the leading essay, which many of the contributors take up. Stanley Benn and Gerald Gaus suggest that the discomfort of liberal thinking on the public-private distinction arises because liberals use two distinct conceptual ...”

“... lives in a shack nearby; they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings.’ Aphorisms may be shacks of this kind, or they may be specially designed shacks made by people who dislike or cannot build castles. The natural rival of this Oxford Book is the Faber Book, compiled by W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger and ...”

“... Bilingualism, multiculturalism, ethno-linguistic identity – they may not be words to conjure with, but much conjuring has nevertheless been done with them. Even the most casual observer can hardly be unaware of the interest in minority ethnic groups, their language and their education; and this has been paralleled by a concern for indigenous groups who speak the national language in a non-standard form ...”

“... provost’s lodgings at King’s College, Cambridge, or in his last years, as provost of Eton. It may seem heartless or unsporting to deconstruct these little tales, for the author made no very exalted claim for them. ‘If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting ...”

“... not all) will have teachers assigned to give instruction in religious matters and they may (or may not) lead in cult performances. They will not necessarily be consecrated priests. There may also be prophets who rise up spontaneously, persons inspired to speak out to guide or ...”

“... with those foundations, or perhaps, as Robin Lane Fox suggests in The Invention of Medicine, may even have been Hippocrates himself, just as the Greeks suspected. Doctors today speak not only of a Hippocratic oath but a Hippocratic face (distorted by the approach of death), a Hippocratic bench (used for setting broken bones) and a Hippocratic manoeuvre ...”

“... looked poisonous. It was keeping close to the wall and seemed to know its way. I’ve a feeling it may have been heading for the van.’ I was relieved that on this occasion she didn’t demand that I ring the police, as she regularly did if anything out of the ordinary occurred. Perhaps this was too out of the ordinary (though it turned out the pet shop in ...”

“... outlet at last in a venomous tirade; not for him the careful think-piece upon which a career may depend, or the glittering parade of witticisms, or the tessitura of erudite references. The night is too short and tomorrow already belongs to another review. What I like most about this companionable creature is his readiness, once his column inches have ...”

“... are a small charity dedicated to the relief of poverty in, say, Camden. With an election due in May 2015, your ‘relevant period’ starts 12 months before. You want to inform the borough’s residents that they have neighbours who can’t afford both to eat and to keep warm; there are families living in overcrowded B&Bs; employers who aren’t paying the ...”

“... Renoir (unfortunately), Picasso. But sculptors have less frequently turned to painting, which may explain why many art historians have found it so difficult to believe that the Florentine sculptor and goldsmith Andrea Verrocchio (1435-88) took up painting relatively late in his career and then abandoned it on recognising the extraordinary ability of his ...”

“... he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court dwarf. This self-involvement may all the more readily be found in literature since most poets tend to be experts on themselves. Outgoing and unegoistic as he was, Keats shows himself in his letters to be endlessly articulate on himself and his writing, and the poems, too, can be read as ...”