“... it seemed, was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... well as of philosophies as being involved. (Among the philosophers, Patricia Churchland and, if I read him right, Dennett, are to be numbered among the connectionists; Skarda and Searle among its opponents.) For Edelman, the key to the brain is how it wires up during development; his claim is that neurons, their connections, and the neural pathways between ...”

“... songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall read the perfect ways of honour,And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.It isn’t clear that these lines were intended as a wholehearted endorsement of nostalgia for the old queen and her times. Only a decade after her funeral, there may have been as ...”

“... I have always thought of Richard Wollheim as embodying the values and interests of a particularly urbane kind of British intellectual, typified by and possibly originating with the members of the Bloomsbury Circle. It encompasses a serious interest in the arts and especially the art of painting; a dedication to some version of socialist politics; a faith in psychoanalysis as therapy and as a theory of the mind; a commitment to articulate an aesthetic philosophy and in some measure to attempt to live by it; a determination to enhance one’s prose with a certain literary surface; and a profound concern for friendship and the life of the heart ...”

“... R.G. Collingwood, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Adrian Stokes, Tony Crosland – as he calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, John Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take this one as any other, though it’s hard to do any ...”

“... parallel when Clinton was told that the architect of his ‘family values’ election campaign, Richard Morris, was about to be exposed in the press as the assiduous client of a call-girl, with whom he had shared White House secrets. It was the worst possible kind of scandal for Clinton, given the past stories of his own extra-marital affairs, now more ...”

“... room, and instead of throwing it away or pitching it to HBO at a later date, gave it to Huggins to read the next morning. It was the last conversation or meeting he had with his enabler, the man who could confirm The Fugitive’s serious intent. Luckily, he had already got enough from Huggins to prove what he wanted: ‘Huggins was a summa cum laude graduate ...”

“... for this one. On both Hanley is accompanied by some very nice men. I’d love to meet her mate Richard, first introduced in Estates. At Solihull College they were ‘the much-talked-about, little practised coming together of north Solihull and south Solihull, a clash of the provincial titans to match Adrian Mole and Pandora’, without the romance. In and ...”

“... and Hall tell is fairly traditional. Admittedly, it is difficult to know how sex advice books were read in the 18th century. There was never in England quite the association of political liberty with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it ...”

“... may just have said; often they are comprehensible only to himself. The passage has usually been read as a transcription of domestic and marital futility, but it is far more than that. Of quite extraordinary interest is the fact that in the manuscript copy the word ‘wonderful’ appears three times in Vivienne’s handwriting along the margin of the entire ...”

“... creditable. And here figure Mairi MacInnes, Miriam Levine (two), Gerry Loose, Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and ...”

“... had won him the case.Although the judge had announced at the start of the hearing that he didn’t read music, his concluding judgment showed a shrewd comprehension of what, musically speaking, had been going on. He recounted that Decca’s A&R man, Richard Rowe (who was to become twice famous, once for signing the Rolling ...”

“... age is cardinal in this matter. When Faulkner got the Nobel Prize for 1949 we all wanted to read this genius who was apparently not widely known even in his own country: four or five years earlier, when Malcolm Cowley was preparing his anthology The Portable Faulkner, it had come as a shock to him to discover that only one of his author’s novels was ...”

“... is a good example of the theory put into practice. But what he added in a footnote was scarier: ‘Richard Ellmann’s bitter, professional Joyce and the weary, enigmatical Wilde are portraits of the biographer as he worked on those big and beautiful books. The real biographies of Joyce and Wilde are the histories of the works they themselves set down. All ...”