“... as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?For some people, the defining, moulding episode of this moribund century is the Final Solution; for others it is the Gulag, the 1989 revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the ...”

“... living in a world imagined by Philip K. Dick; this was easily recognisable even if you’d barely read him. To those who knew his work well, the morning-after debate consisted of whether Trump was more like Buster Friendly, the fascist demagogue television personality from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or President Fremont from Radio Free ...”

“... long provenance: the Highlands were a testbed for 18th and 19th-century agricultural Improvement (read: Clearances); St Kilda was a ‘natural experiment’ after the evacuation of its population in 1930, and so was the island of Rum, after it was sold to the Nature Conservancy Council in 1957 (it’s now owned by NatureScot). In all these cases, the language ...”

“... national character to be of a ‘heroism almost approaching the sublime’. Although the book was read (and sometimes admired) in Asia and Africa, it was impossible to square its emphatic voluntarism with the idea that global power structures trapped colonised peoples in relations of dependency. Smiles was impatient with structures. ‘It may be of ...”

“... have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our time’. Sisson’s critical writing is intelligent, sharp, individual and readable. He ...”

“... stands) or as a star figure in the creation of ‘the city as a work of art’ (the title of Donald Olsen’s book on the subject, published in 1988). Aesthetics were not Louis-Napoleon’s strong point. In the eclectic medley of Second Empire styles, his basic preferences were Modernist; he was a glass-and-iron man, as evidenced by his enthusiasm for ...”

“... was more than just a tyrannical thug. He could be self-deprecatingly humorous, and was deeply read in Arab and foreign literature (Hemingway was a favourite). Once, catching a TV presenter in a grammatical error, he phoned the minister of culture to complain, decreeing a six-month suspension for the offender. His own literary efforts occupied an ...”

“... It’s​ almost impossible to read any work on meritocracy without being reminded that the word was first used in mid-20th-century Britain to portray a dystopian society, a rigid caste system in which a smug elite claimed power on the basis of superior effort and ability. But it was imperial China where meritocratic ideals were first brought to life ...”

“... my dearest dears’) and, having completed it, wrote vertically up the margin: ‘Do not read this letter as a softness. I am hard as fucking nails.’ You wonder how they took so bizarrely double-minded a letter. He could write very tenderly about Dunsmuir, but endorsed Marianne Moore’s description of marriage as ‘being alone together’, and in ...”

“... the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.’ That sounds like Donald Rumsfeld’s rather pithier ‘stuff happens,’ though in Rumsfeld’s case the realisation came too late. Churchill was good at the longue durée. Sometimes. That was his problem. He made a whole lot of predictions, but more of them were wrong than ...”

“... statement, made by a woman who was raped, while unconscious, by a college athlete in Stanford, was read online eight million times. In September, the judge who sentenced the perpetrator to just six months in jail was asked to stand down from his job as a girls’ tennis coach. In a statement, the judge said he did so to ‘protect the players from the ...”

“... Grammar School, Rada and an acting job with a touring Shakespeare company in Ireland, a job with Donald Wolfit, a few years in rep, attention as a playwright for The Room (1957), and The Birthday Party (1958), sudden and extravagant fame for The Caretaker (1960). Pinter married the actress Vivien Merchant in 1956; they had a son, Daniel, in 1958. Pinter ...”

“... the other hand? On the same hand, surely, since the words which follow are the words we have just read. No, on the other hand, because the writer is different, and the meaning of the words is also different. How could Menard, a 20th-century writer using a foreign language, setting his novel in the 16th century, not write differently from the native speaker ...”

“... a supposed British agent in Hungary was played backwards, sounding, according to Bardens, like ‘Donald Duck squeaks’. Meanwhile, a less promising segment on a British millionaire who imported fish from Iceland was scuppered by the last-minute absence of a studio interview; a large dead cod on ice, drying under the TV lights, had to stand in as the main ...”

“... confluence of Quinean and Wittgensteinian lines of thought – found, for example, in the work of Donald Davidson – created a philosophical climate in which the very idea of ‘necessary truth’ was viewed with scepticism. But the climate suddenly changed, thanks to Kripke. Celebrating the entrance of his hero on the philosophical scene, Soames for once ...”