“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the narrative, the punchline that anyone can see coming. Land of Marvels is an altogether more genteel affair than Sacred Hunger, perhaps because, at least among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I ought to have been among other things a good poet,’ Thomas Lovell Beddoes wrote in the postscript to the brief and perfunctory note he left before swallowing a lethal dose of poison. He was 45 years old and had published nothing, save the odd poem, for a quarter of a century. In 1821, as a precocious Oxford undergraduate, he had brought out a volume called The Improvisatore, which was followed in 1822 by a verse drama, The Brides’ Tragedy ...”

“... Frances Milton waited until she was 30 before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ of a rich, unmarried and conveniently antique uncle. The dutiful Mrs Trollope had seven children in ten years (only two were to survive into mature age), while her husband contrived to ruin ...”

“... The legend named Thomas Chatterton is less marvellous than the boy it glorified, and far less rich or strange than the cultural history that includes the history of the legend itself. Chatterton committed suicide in August 1770. He was not yet 18 years old. With little formal education – seven years in a provincial school, followed by less than three years as a lawyer’s apprentice – he left his native Bristol to make his way as a writer in London, where he died only four months later ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”