“... or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of writing’, also believes, according to Norris, that ‘literary critics had best give up the idea that philosophy (or “theory”) is capable of solving any problems created by their own ...”

“... a place in some literary equivalent of Wisden (‘the largest number of multi-volume histories read by a Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy ...”

“... The son’s book was a runaway success, the father’s remaindered. Not many famous writers can be read in terms of their immediate ancestry: Graves is an exception. Powerful wires were in some way crossed or the terminals wrongly connected: the result, an assortment of literary skills bordering on genius, but so heterogeneous that they get blurred, as in ...”

“... Committee on Finance and Industry, moreover, Keynes looked forward eagerly to debating it with Sir Richard Hopkins, the Treasury’s official spokesman. Yet this contest, for one reason or another, was never joined on level terms, for neither in the Treasury Memorandum of 1929, countering the Liberal scheme, nor in Hopkins’s evidence to the Macmillan ...”

“... instructive sign of the times. When Churchill died in 1965, we thought we were burying the past. Richard Crossman, a reluctant mourner at the funeral, wrote afterwards: ‘It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed ...”

“... on the feasts of Christ and Mary and the times of fasting. Legenda means ‘material to be read’; saints’ legends took their name from the fact that they were read in church on the appropriate days. Grounded in sacred presence, integrated with the rhythms of summer and winter, seed time and harvest, the Legend ...”

“... Richard Posner, Federal judge, prolific writer and teacher, is the leading figure in the American ‘law and economics’ movement. That movement has pioneered a new way of explaining Anglo-American law and showing how it could be improved. Its method is to analyse topics – for example, the law of compensation for accidents – in economic terms ...”

“... varnish’. For him, Wyclif’s uncompromising predestinarianism was ‘a grisly creed’. To read Wyclif was ‘not fun’. And he wrote of Wyclif’s ‘catastrophic incompetence as a practical reformer . . . Nothing is to be gained by overestimating the extent of the English heresiarch’s achievement.’ This was an iconoclastic exercise, justified ...”

“... Winding up his efforts in the 1954 mid-term elections Vice-President Richard Nixon handed an aide the notes of his last campaign speech and said: ‘You might like to keep it as a souvenir. It’s the last one, because after this I am through with politics.’ Suffering one of his periodic depressions, Nixon had considered the matter with his wife Pat, and decided that he should retire from politics once his term as Vice-President finished in 1956 ...”

“... as ‘one of the great classics of literature’ (to stick with Matthews), without often being read or assessed as literature. Books such as Boswell’s Johnson and Macaulay’s History once gave rise to the same apparent category error, but they have long since received the full hermeneutic treatment. So far Pepys has survived intact, greater in the ...”

“... her glasses but she didn’t want to be photographed wearing them. ‘I’ll just pretend to read it,’ she said, and the ghost of Charles Dickens, great lover of charades, was heard to laugh in that part of the ether where life is much stranger than fiction. Charles sat in an armchair, his wife sat beside him, and the actress ...”

“... had known as The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, Richard Duke of York and All Is True, for example, reappeared as, respectively, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 and Henry VIII.) Pre-Christian British kings, however, though just as solemnly vouched for by Holinshed’s Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as ...”

“... popworld of Beavis and Butthead and the fortysomething editors who deify Rosanne Arnold and Richard Nixon on the same page. Editors once made yearly scouting trips up to the North Country, just to avoid getting sucked into the black hole of fad and revisionism. These trips, which took place in the spring and always in a four-wheel-drive ...”

“... His hunchback has informed a whole school of Gramsci studies which argues that his work must be read above all in the light of his disability and of the extreme poverty of his Sardinian background. Other schools privilege the impact of industrial Turin, the confrontation with the intellectual milieu at the university there and the early ‘conversion’ to ...”

“... as she had had in the past with other men of letters – with Hugh Stuart Boyd on prosody, with Richard Hengist Horne on contemporary literature, with Benjamin Robert Haydon on the artist’s vocation. Browning in this first letter told her that he loved her poetry with its ‘fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new ...”