“... Each paragraph is as firmly packed as a steamer trunk.Not all of this information serves any vital purpose (do we really need to know that Roth wrote to the co-op board on behalf of his agent, Andrew Wylie? Or that Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe read a goofy telegram at Roth’s sixtieth birthday bash purportedly from John Updike that began ‘Masel ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... For David Edmonds​ , and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more ...”

“... selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for ...”

“... de-forms, dissociates. This fact brings chaos into Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island: for it is vital to his fast and intensely clever effects – and Kenner is the most brilliant critic of Modernism, who never writes less than amusingly – to presuppose impatient positions, never questioned or argued out. He assumes an audience totally complicit, and an ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same ...”

“... out in its usual luxurious fashion, like unravelling wool. Until you are cool, settled and your vital signs good, time snaps and sings like an elastic band. When I write my diaries I talk to myself with an inward voice. For the next week I am conscious that my brain is working oddly. Imagine you were creating all your experience by writing it into ...”

“... by his book. William Gass was right to agree that many of the values defended by Rybczynski are ‘vital and worthy’, and to accept – albeit ‘at a certain split-level of ontology’ – that there is ‘nothing better than the life of the bourgeois’. He was also right to persist with critical questions beyond this point. Rybczynski may describe ...”

“... younger adults made for a profound reinforcement of ‘family’ values. In uniform or in ‘vital’ work, people had yearned for family life as it had been before the war – only better. They wanted full employment, they wanted improved educational opportunities, they wanted cradle-to-grave social security and good modern housing. Labour, elected to ...”

“... points – especially the deontological ones. I shall describe two.The first is a theory owed to David Hume, which seeks not to discredit deontological requirements but to show that they are not morally basic, because they can be explained in terms of other values. The theory is called rule-consequentialism, or in one of its more specific ...”

“... wrought by Nayim’s unimaginable spontaneity, lobbing the ball from the half-way line clean over David Seaman’s head into the net to win the match for Zaragosa. In none of these cases is the beauty of the events lost when we revisit them. Indeed, one could well argue that it is only by revisiting the site of a moment of artistic inspiration that its beauty ...”

“... The answer, Mead believed, was for people to design a personal culture. Twenty years later, David Riesman would credit Mead with having inspired him when he made a similar point in The Lonely Crowd: personal ‘autonomy’ was the solution to the conflict between tradition-based ‘inner-directedness’ and self-diffusing ‘other-directedness’. On ...”

“... does in The Paradox of American Power (2002), that international norms may have to give way to ‘vital survival interests’, that ‘at times we will have to go it alone’ – he should not be excited by his use of violence. National security demands a monkish self-denial, where officials forego the comforts of conscience and the pleasures of impulse in ...”

“... in these pages, as a wisdom awaiting its vindication in a globalised epoch yet to come. In vital ways, Spinoza told the whole story: his apparently abstract pantheistic philosophy explained history itself, future as well as past, and the globalisation process simply favours a return to such understanding, after the mounting sorrows and delusions of ...”