“... Dick, has been landed with his opprobrious nickname because of a regrettable accident which took place in his childhood: the nickname celebrates ironically the fact that he shot a pregnant woman dead, with a shot discharged at random out of the cupola of the family home. But it is the very guilt which attaches to this random and intrinsically absurd ...”

“... questioning about his beliefs. A deist, not an atheist, he could declare a belief in God, but he took good care not to compromise his principles. For a man of 83, coughing blood, it was ‘a masterly performance’. This really was an age of progress, McManners agrees, and some of its improving ideas were remarkably far-reaching. There were public-spirited ...”

“... meanwhile, shows his customary tendency to metamorphose into an indeterminate life-form. ‘He took her hand and put it on his penis. The hot sticky organ was already beginning to rise and fill. It moved under her touch like an animal.’ A field mouse? A boa constrictor? Receiving the benefit of Stash’s extensive sexual education, Francesca conceives ...”

“... the inevitable moderating influence of power (a liberal view that the Manchester Guardian once took when Hitler became Chancellor) and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however ...”

“... the book is more straightforward and positive. Mailer speaks of him as ‘the only man who never took advantage of Marilyn’; though he also had other commitments, and seems to have realised that he could not, in any case, save her from her host of psychic demons. What Greene could do was capture some classic images of Marilyn’s incarnation as sexual myth ...”

“... of Artificial Intelligence, in which Hofstadter takes a line which tackles both the objections of John Searle to the very proposition of machine-based intelligence and the claims of Herbert Simon that such an intelligence is already emerging. But there are many other topics, which take him well beyond the terrain of the earlier books. Some of these seem to me ...”

“... men and women could be rendered tolerable. If two people went to church in festive dress and took part in a pretty rite in the presence of their friends, and then shared the same house and always went about together, then one could think of these public things as all that was happening.’ No doubt Dame Rebecca would have wanted to tidy up these ...”

“... others. The assumption that ‘we only directly observe sense data’ was vigorously attacked by John Austin, and before him (and in different ways) by William James and by Husserl. The very question, ‘How does thought hook on to the world?’ was undermined by Wittgenstein. Yet, by and large, these attacks on the epistemological model – and without ...”

“... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...”

“... Allowed to read this work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise ...”

“... to the Arabs because such a compromise would lead to Israel’s death; the second attacked John le Carré for suggesting that Israel might have over-reacted (‘It is as if we British had lost our temper with the IRA,’ le Carré had written in the previous week’s Observer, ‘and decided to punish the entire Irish people once and for all’); and ...”

“... to metabolise the cargo of steroids, hormones, tissue-boosters and flavour-enhancers that you took aboard with your lunch. In terms of drug-ingestion, the only difference between taking afternoon tea and going on a crack-binge is one of degree – degree of chemical potency, degree of personal commitment, degree of acceptable damage. The many formulations ...”

“... even by their own definition of Jewishness’. The Nazi definition of a Jew admitted of degree, it took stock of paternity, and it more or less discounted religion. And another difficulty, which is inflammatory, is how to hold in balance, on the one hand, that for which so many died and, on the other hand, that for which others claim a novel citizenship, while ...”

“... to be small, ugly, ignorant and coarse. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge had known her before she met John Hatfield, a bigamist who tricked her into a fraudulent marriage, and both men were united in their venomous hatred of her seducer. Yet Hatfield, whose exploits eventually brought him to the gallows, was, as Bragg shows, one of the popular heroes of the ...”

“... of the Jews in Germany. Nor is there any premonition in the book of Charlotte’s own death, which took place in Auschwitz in 1943. She ends the story triumphantly, rejecting the temptation of suicide and determined, ‘alone with her experiences and her paint brush’, to produce the present work. Her state of mind at the end is largely due to the ideas of an ...”