“... Englander’ in Taylor coming out, a superannuated cast of mind he shares with his close friend Michael Foot. It is English history that one writes, the Scots, Irish and Welsh constituting ‘the lesser breeds [who] were allowed in when they made a difference in English affairs, as they often did.’ It is also a lingering sense that Britain is still a ...”

“... impulses? Or does Kant have some sturdy intuitions on his side too? If semantics really is (as Michael Dummett has claimed) ‘first philosophy’, should we try desperately to make the right decision between Russell and Kripke, so as to know whether it will be necessary to reconstruct the rest of philosophy and culture? Modern thought on everything from ...”

“... ground; ancient architects induced a subtle curvature into a line of columns so that it would look straight. Kant’s philosophy of perception would not require symbolic emendation were we to live under the starry heavens without language or culture, matters to which he paid no great heed. What Panofsky supposed is that people under different symbolic systems ...”

“... of the most-famous-butterfly-hunter-in-the-world ready to swipe, the gaze for once directed straight at us, the chubby knees beaming ingenuously; and we know the quarry is no palpitating ‘lep’, as he called them, but palpitating us. This bit of calculated charm appears in most books about Nabokov, but decently tucked away. Here it provides the ...”

“... carpenters, labourers and odd-job men. In taste and style, the garden is unashamedly aristocratic. Straight lines are to be avoided because they are ‘extremely vulgar’, and there is no room for ‘the more vulgar sort of flower’. The overall effect is to be ...”

“... the eyes are abominable, and about the mouth. Eyebrows making one circle, if meeting, or close and straight, are equally bad . . . Eyes long, and wide between the eyebrows; and no wrinkles in the forehead when they laugh, or about the mouth, are signs of bad luck and duplicity. Eyes all zigzag are full of lies. A low, flat forehead is bad; so are uneven ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... abdomen, frozen in death, a microscopic Pompeii. Zoom in further and you can see structures straight out of a biology textbook: mitochondria, bubble-shaped fat reservoirs, even cellular nuclei. Poinar and Hess later speculated that if a mosquito were preserved in amber just after it had sucked blood from a dinosaur, it might be possible to recover the ...”

“... disclose to the wider world and to ourselves.Mandeville was born in Rotterdam in 1670. His father, Michael, was a physician, and Bernard followed in his footsteps, studying medicine and philosophy at Leiden. His thesis in 1691 concerned the effects of digestion on mental processes. This early interest in psychology persisted, and he chose hypochondria and ...”

“... of investigation, so I bypassed the merchandise counter with its ectoplasmic T-shirts and made straight for the auditorium – or was it Valhalla, the hall of the slain?The auditorium had an emptiness that could speak to us all. One shouldn’t really, in this context, use the phrase ‘warm-up act’, but there he was in a loud shirt, Rob Green from ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... to the Communist Manifesto). He writes rudely about Acton’s pontificating – it leads straight to 1066 and All That – and he is not much less rude about Burckhardt. His own grasp is sometimes weaker when he has to tackle a larger theme than usual – say, ‘Fascism’. There are signs that he is occasionally uneasy about this: he can say ...”

“... analogies between the public and private accounts make one realise the power of each. To plunge straight into Unger’s book is like viewing a picture from too close: you need to appreciate the aesthetics of the whole before you value each part. Even his vocabulary, with its terms of art and its apparent preciosities, makes much more sense once you realise ...”

“... a series of brief, knockabout, allegedly comic exchanges with Plomley, the actor manqué, as the straight man – a role he clearly enjoyed:Plomley (reads): ‘Vic Oliver – comedian, lightning club manipulator, violinist and comedy trick cyclist. Light work done with a horse and van.’ Is this a photograph of you?Oliver: Don’t you think it’s like ...”

“... her parentage at her baptism 11 years after her mother’s death, and the parish register for St Michael, Queenhithe, in the City of London, records: ‘Laura daughter of William Jerdan and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’. Asked for her father’s profession or rank, Laura appears to have been unsure what to say. The beginnings of ‘Manufacturer’ and ...”