“... of Master and Slave’. Kojève​ wrapped up his lectures in the summer of 1939, but any plans he may have had were dashed by the outbreak of war. He was called up in December and undertook military training until his unit was dissolved the following May. After the fall of France, he spent a year in occupied Paris, working ...”

“... can do is to say: try doing it my way; try describing what goes on in my terms; perhaps you may find that I have given you better tools with which to achieve your ends. The philosophers who will most dislike Dennett’s book – those who will be most convinced that he has merely explained consciousness away – are those who believe that some of the ...”

“... nuclear threat. ‘Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating that situation and the gravity of the threat,’ he claimed. An article in Time Magazine in December asked ‘How soon will Saddam get the bomb?’ It concluded: ‘Not nearly so soon as the Bush Administration claims.’ Stories ...”

“... of Clinton’s disastrous Presidency with the new prominence of the Family Values theme may now be in the process of creating not merely one but two new parties: one for anti-FV Republicans, and a second for socially conservative white Democrats, as opposed to old Republicans and so-called coalition Democrats (i.e. very-liberal ...”

“... another, languages intersect on every corner and psychotics jabber in the street. Street lighting may have been improved after the Ripper killings of 1888, but Spitalfields remains a place of unpredictable encounters – full of intriguing little surprises as one unlikely appearance gives way to the next. The story of Rodinsky’s disappearance becomes a ...”

“... bent. However, his system has proved rotten at securing for him what he wanted – and may still want – leadership of the Labour Party. What is Bennism now? In many ways, as he keeps insisting, it is the polar opposite of Thatcherism – though, as both volumes of the diaries show, Benn saw many of the same social-cum-political movements at work ...”

“... completely and for many years have been in favour of them. I love intelligent women who eventually may beat one in an argument.’ As a born-again analyst, callow and idealistic, Wittels was something of a problem for the Vienna Society. Of his paper on the Russian revolutionary the minutes record that ‘the speaker expresses his personal dislike of Leontiev ...”

“... that Anton Chekhov, the most sought after of Russia’s eligible bachelors, had, in Moscow on 25 May 1901, married a Lutheran actress, Olga Knipper, at least a dozen women exclaimed: ‘Why not me?’ There were the painters: Maria Drozdova dropped her brushes and her palette when she heard the news, exclaiming that she thought God had reserved Chekhov as a ...”

“... might call populist in both its positive and negative senses’. The rather puzzling last phrase may be designed to cover the case of George Cannon, who in his later career became a straightforward pornographer – and understandably loses the advocacy of Dr McCalman. There were a few journalists and publishers in the 1830s and after who continued to combine ...”

“... minds in their writers, as do troubled families or systems of belief: but while being so troubled may be a powerful incitement to literary production, it may equally get in the way of real achievement. Writers can find themselves facing a dilemma, a choice between fidelity to their own passionate confusions and the possibly ...”

“... no ethno-historical evidence for any cult of this kind, but proposes hopefully that this may be because the prohibition on warfare enforced by the earliest Spanish colonial authorities ‘drove any such organisation underground’. But in the absence of any attempt to engage in an analysis of the social and cultural features of Anasazi ...”

“... reduce Abstract Ideas to that same passive participle he became Hazlitt’s opponent. This matter may seem dry: but such grammar is pertinent to David Bromwich’s observations about Hazlitt’s handling of Abstract Ideas. He recognises, for instance, that it is important that Matthew Arnold used the noun ‘disinterestedness’ where Hazlitt preferred the ...”

“... to another word about Hemingway’s home town Oak Park, a posh suburb of Chicago; and although it may seem a little ungracious to say so, for she was an interesting woman, you may feel some regret that a thousand letters from Hadley to Ernest have survived. Although Reynolds and Griffin (who has two further volumes in ...”

“... worst) plumb in the middle of whatever we understand by Anglo-American Modernism in poetry. Anyone may be excused for deciding that life is too short for coming to terms with The Cantos: but if we make that decision we thereby disqualify ourselves from having any opinion worth listening to, about the poetry in English of this century. What incessantly ...”

“... not seriously doubt his right to be one’; and Canetti goes on to quote an anonymous diarist (it may have been the Berlin poet Oskar Loerke) who wrote ten days before the outbreak of the Second World War: ‘But everything is over. If I were really a poet, I would have to be able to prevent the war.’ Paying homage to the sense of reponsibility that makes a ...”