“... The rise of S.G. Warburg & Co was the most striking feature of the postwar City. Founded by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1940s, the bank was an awkward upstart in the closed shop of London merchant banking. Through a combination of hard work, professionalism and sheer boldness, it became one of the biggest of the merchant banks, and certainly the most dynamic ...”

“... Whatever​ the outcome of the independence referendum in Scotland this September, it will be followed by an extensive inquest into the workings of the British constitution. In some quarters inquiries have already started. The Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee of the House of Commons issued a report in March last year titled Do We Need a Constitutional Convention for the UK? The Liberal Democrats’ Home Rule and Community Rule Commission has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union ...”

“... received a few complaints. Some have stuck in the memory. ‘He made us read a whole book by Hume.’ Or the student in a class on 19th-century intellectual history who grumbled about having to read books from the anthropology and biology sections of the library; surely that wasn’t part of a history degree? A tiny minority of students found fault ...”

“... hold yourself differently, walk differently – and breathe differently. ‘Deportment’ used to be a key term in the civilising process: finishing schools taught young ladies to walk with a book balanced on their head. Keep that head up and tuck that tail in! Bumsters from ‘Nihilism’, S/S 1994 ‘Highland Rape’, A/W 1995 Shaun Leane’s spine corset ...”

“... other examples of animal behaviour, that the honeybee indicates the direction and distance of food by varying the angle of its posture and the length of its waggle-dance; that the calls of male chaffinches combine territorial challenges addressed to other males with invitations addressed to females, and that those of Campbell’s monkeys have components with ...”

“... leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society.’ He is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’ Independently of Karl Marx – little known and never influential among Victorian intellectuals – a great many critics fustigated this way of thinking. Fire and brimstone evangelists ...”

“... belletristic waffling on the grounds that he was modestly self-deprecating. He had indeed much to be self-deprecating about. Astonishingly, Taylor even manages to imply that Quiller-Couch’s genteel brand of literary appreciation was in some ways preferable to the critical rigour of the Leavisites. He has a good word to say about ...”

“... have voted for ‘enhanced devolution’ (‘devo-max’) in the three-option referendum desired by Alex Salmond, but were forced in the two-option referendum permitted by David Cameron to choose between the stark alternatives of Union or independence.* In the latter stages of the campaign, as Devine warns his ...”

“... years ago, philosophy took the problem of consciousness as one of the three major challenges faced by anyone attempting a theory of the relation between mind and body. The others were the problem of ‘qualia’, explaining how the subjective feel of the mind could be a feature of a physical system; and ...”

“... witness at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in ...”

“... first this insight dismays him, but he comes to accept that the past ‘is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events’ and that ‘he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.’ He is suddenly relieved. It seems there is a permanence to things that both guarantees one’s own tribulations and makes ...”

“... his poetry has a prickliness about it, as did the poet: a quality of neither asking nor needing to be liked. In any event he would have been pleased to return home to Austin, where – after his childhood in Cornwall and degree at Oxford and teaching in Zürich and London – he had been living for the last fifty years. He owned a flash pair of cowboy ...”

“... unpersuasive, counterpoint to the nightmarish vision of the hyper-capitalist gig economy envisaged by Tory Brexiteers. It isn’t, however, the alternative Remainers crave. A split is emerging between career politicians in the two main parties and the 48 per cent who voted Remain. Most Remainer MPs have moved on, leaving the Remainer public with no reliable ...”

“... resistance to the idea of African contingents bearing arms on European soil. Churchill was enraged by what he saw as the stupidity of this position. He was not alone. Charles Darnley Stuart Stephens, who had served in the Lagos police and commanded a battalion of British Nigerians some forty years earlier, wrote in the English Review in 1916 recommending the ...”

“... of Di Benedetto’s style; not so easy to live with what that style chooses to show us. David Pérez Vega, in a blog of 2011, finds in The Silencer a phrase that ‘appears to be a synthesis of Di Benedetto’s reflections on existence’: ‘How can they ignore the essential fact, that error is incorporated into ...”