“... a lot less time for James Hogg than for the Ettrick Shepherd, the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood’s Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naive folk-wisdom, easy to patronise, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral Lowlands, a survival ...”

“... to the trouble of remedying the defects with a revised edition that extends the original length by over a third. Each year of the stated period gets a decent amount of coverage; a solid 1994 postscript has been added to each except the last, which is followed by a chapter-length Postlude. Letters to Craft from Aldous ...”

“... What was it that departed during the first week of September? Much of the country was not convulsed by grief, although we do not know the proportion that stayed unmoved, or even critical, and perceived the events as a Southern or heartland spectacle. Yet it appears to be true that even among the more detached, many found themselves touched by unsuspected melancholy, strangely coupled to a sense of liberation and change ...”

“... system, each voter casts two ballots – one for the prime minister and one for the parties to be represented in the 120-seat Knesset. In the contest for the premiership Barak defeated Binyamin Netanyahu by 56 to 44 per cent and his victory has produced a political earthquake comparable to the upheaval of 1977, when the ...”

“... is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of ...”

“... was audacious, even scandalous. Fashion was flagrantly not merit. Writers, if they were to be thought of as better than hired hands, were characters who cultivated some kind of superiority to fashion, publicity, even print itself. Sterne affected no such loftiness. Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph ...”

“... give me the reassuring feeling that I really know what’s going on in Japan. The casting can only be called inspired. Playing the female lead has been Makiko Tanaka, 58, the former Foreign Minister, mother of three and only daughter of Kakuei Tanaka, Japan’s most admired, reviled and powerful Prime Minister of the postwar years, a force in Japanese politics ...”

“... billion (at current values) to 588 American geniuses. Many times more than the total distributed by the Arts Council, British Academy and Leverhulme Foundation combined. The annual list is as eagerly awaited as the Nobel Prizes, the National Book Awards or (in the academic community, at least) the Oscars. Decisions are made ...”

“... of memoirs, Testament of Youth, never since out of print. And then in the 1970s, that celebration by the women’s movement of this shining example of sisterhood and of the struggles of our great foremothers (inspired, perhaps, by the cadences of Brittain’s prose: ‘From the days of Homer the friendships of men have ...”

“... James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social circle that was soon dominated by painters. In 1951 and again from 1955 until his death, O’Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became a curator of exhibitions and a well known figure in the New York art world. In 1959 he embarked on a tumultuous love affair with Vincent ...”

“... OED, as coming from Paradoxe sur le comédien, Diderot’s account of why the greatest actor must be a person of zero sensibility, ‘un spectateur froid et tranquille’ of human nature. The phrase seems untranslatable because it belongs so clearly to its milieu: we imagine the Philosophes in their salons, not afraid of any ideas, valuing only each other’s ...”

“... Nearly everything he wrote is interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its freedom to be verbose) and its generosity of spirit.There is one obvious exception, which I’d like to describe here. I’m prompted to do so by two fascinating, if dispiriting discussions of his visit to Egypt in early 1967 that ...”

“... around the time that philosophers began reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations side by side with Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Since then, more and more analytic philosophers have come to agree with Putnam that ‘part of the problem with present-day philosophy is a scientism inherited from the 19th century.’ Putnam urges us to ...”

“... mid-1960s, before it became part of the Health and Safety Executive: a philosophy graduate could be as successful as a chartered engineer. Indeed, diversity was one of its main strengths: the combination of a small group of specialists and a larger group with a wide variety of backgrounds gave it the ability to see a problem from many different perspectives ...”

“... over in academia Prince is still the party tape of choice. Publishing ‘like it’s 1999’ may be variously interpreted, but whatever the resulting book is called, the assumption is the same: the end of the millennium is inextricably linked with apocalypse, the end of the world, and the messianic fanatics who seek to bring it about. And so although these ...”