“... read. And he would not have said of Goethe what he said of Shakespeare. He lamented what he took to be the decline in the value of German music composed after the 19th century. He did agree that the arts don’t exist in isolation from everything else, that you need to know about a whole culture before you can pronounce on its arts, but he also pointed ...”

“... Even those determined to assimilate – like the successful businessman who buys one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing the day he was murdered, and religiously slips it on every evening – are torn between Vietnamese and American customs. The stories skilfully trace the dilemmas and pains of immigrant experience, and they also constitute a wide-ranging ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of ‘post-materialist’ or ‘post-industrial’ politics which in Germany, for example, took an environmental direction were in Britain channelled in a socialist direction by our peculiarly polarised class society and party system. However, the activists of the Seventies were driven by interest as well as ideology. They were a growing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than a gentleman (one of his favourite distinctions), a competent professional of modern spirit. John Kennedy was already dead, but the New Frontier spirit seemed to be alive in the Britain of 1964, and Harold Wilson to exemplify it. We believed him, or some of us did, when he said that he would get Britain going again, bring in new people, harness new ...”

“... This is true both for the content and for the scale of the prosecutions. Scotland, unlike England, took seriously the notion of the pact with the devil, and searched for witches by means of a ‘brodder’, whose task was to find the witch’s mark. Moreover, the scale of the witchcraft phenomenon in Scotland was much greater than in England. Dr Larner had a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... feel, imagine or remember which, in their judgment, requires to be curtailed or cancelled.’ John Wing is taken to task for remarking that a young woman’s grief-stricken response to the death of her husband is a ‘typical depressive reaction’: ‘Her grief and mourning are looked upon as a pathological syndrome. The basic decisions are of a ...”

“... terms, it was a replay of what had occurred more than a century earlier, when Addison and Steele took it upon themselves to sober England up after the long debauch of the Restoration. The best they could supply by way of ‘role model’, chivalry itself having disappeared into the limbo to which reasonable men had consigned the Middle Ages at large, was Sir ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”