“... of temporal life, something through which one can exist by proxy outside of time. No one could be more opposed in character to this Platonic temperament than Sir Isaiah Berlin, whose love of the present – and of the presentness of other times and persons in their time – is the true love of life, and whose writings, to the inevitably limited extent that ...”

“... if not entirely unsuspected, about the way Cheney operates. Gellman and Becker’s series was more concerned with Cheney’s methods than with his motives (Halliburton is mentioned only once), and this was surely the right emphasis: what politicians do is generally more significant than their reasons for doing it. But ...”

“... of those to last us fifty years. Whingeing double-income liberal parents, please let us have no more of their banal utterances.’ At the centre of One Day are a married couple, Priya Patnaik and Ben Tennyson. He is a schoolteacher and cookery writer; she works in radio. They live together in North London, in a flat just off the Holloway Road, with their ...”

“... regularly pressed: Nicholas Malebranche (b. 1638), to be inserted between Leibniz and Locke; and Thomas Reid (1710-96), best inserted between Hume and Kant rather than between Berkeley and Hume, on the grounds that his major works are a response to Hume, who was his junior by exactly one year.Rebounding passionately from Hume, Reid founded the Scottish ...”

“... to ‘take Britain into Europe’ had a public relations problem. Is that still the case? Are Hugh Thomas and Michael Heseltine right in arguing that Britain’s leaders are now lagging behind public opinion in Europeanism or, at the very least, that they are failing in their duty to enthuse us? That two Conservative public figures should, within a space of ...”

“... The strong line taken by both Edna Longley and W.J. McCormack – who are sometimes in accord, but more often at loggerheads – testifies to the ebullience of Irish letters, in which things often get very heated indeed. Not invariably, it’s true: a level-headed approach is exemplified in the Irish essays of Denis Donoghue, in which sharpness of ...”

“... most of his contemporaries’ ambitions only stretched as far as Isis. Whether his success was more or less surprising given his poor, South London background and short, patchy education is hard to tell. The middle-aged literary grandees who took him up were all university-educated and may have found Barker’s unschooled eloquence refreshingly ...”

“... the Sunday newspaper I had joined as a junior reporter sent me one Saturday afternoon to see Sir Thomas Beecham, then at the height of his fame as a conductor. The paper had written his profile, and I was told to take a proof and show it to him, to ensure that it was factually correct. Clutching the galleys, I rang the bell at his house in St John’s ...”

“... whether you’re wearing knickers or mind, as Wittgenstein didn’t, living on porridge; goodness more accessible if you’re what my mother used to call ‘a sluppers’.Nobody explains (or seems to think an explanation required) how this unworldly woman managed to be made a dame by Mrs Thatcher and was laden with honorary degrees; sheer inadvertence ...”

“... Bering Straits. In the dozen or so years since the death of Geoffrey Elton, the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s prime minister and plenipotentiary, has been similarly airbrushed out of history. Elton, as anyone who did the Tudors for A Levels or read history at Cambridge between 1950 and 1980 knows, made Cromwell the centrepiece of his ...”

“... Spain. The impression of the war which had been left on the public mind in 1961 was that it was a more complicated affair than people had assumed at the time: the picture of a small group of fascists rising, as part of a carefully-organised international conspiracy, against a beleaguered democracy was false; the democracy was ailing and had suffered before ...”

“... course it is a long book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography ...”

“... Cold War: all the major powers found it handy to have ears there. A French diplomat could learn more about Spain’s next move in Venice than in Madrid. Meanwhile, the regime itself practised communication of another sort, mounting elaborate public ceremonies on land and water to dazzle and awe both locals and ...”

“... that might shatter or fall on us, following the advice of the Civil Protection Department – and, more to the point, the geography teacher. One of the strangest things about being in an earthquake – apart from the feeling of being at the top of a thirty-foot birch tree in a thirty-mile-an-hour wind when you’re actually crouching on the floor of your house ...”

“... change with the passage of time, the asymmetry of our attitudes towards the past and the future; more generally, the incompatibility between leading a life and maintaining a detached stance of neutrality concerning all the points in that life – a neutrality ostensibly based on the premise that the particular time when something happens, per se, can have no ...”