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“... the achievements and accuracies of the natural sciences. This is as true of the tedious volumes of Herbert Spencer, who needed a special chair, fitted with nails, to stop him falling asleep, as it is of Marxism. It holds, too, for the spate of scientific programmes, many of them German in origin, that were laid down for the attack on the final ...”

“... and when he is dealing with things in the public realm (where a reader or a reviewer can test the matter), he is inclined to be, not inaccurate exactly, but approximate. Thus Eliot did not ‘define’ wit as ‘the recognition, “implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible” ’. Eliot said of wit, ‘It ...”

“... Georg Lukacs and the sometime OSS and CIA agent, sometime Communist, and active conspirator Herbert Marcuse, who used to begin his lectures with the singsong ‘There are no conspiracies in history.’ The ‘authoritarian personality’ dogma of such Frankfurt School existentialists as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, is derived from the same ...”

“... War, and a later photograph shows sailors gathered round sewing machines. Folk art here was a matter of ‘us’, males bonding over abstract or patriotic designs. Williams went beyond that. In his scheme, the four national symbols of the British Isles are upstaged by something like a résumé of human history, ranging through Adam, Cain, Noah and Jonah ...”

“... of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews. In the ...”

“... from No 1, a photograph of the founder and his son, the strangely whiskered Julius Reuter and Herbert, circa 1870, to No 63, a Reuters news picture of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. No 17 shows an outpost of the Reuters empire in 1900: Kalgoorlie, Australia, with men in suits and one in a straw hat lounging outside the Miners Institute, which ...”

“... It was fortunate for George Eliot, or Marian Evans as she was in 1852, that the philosopher Herbert Spencer rejected her brave and desperate pleas for him to marry her. If he had accepted, she might well have found herself in something akin to Sarah Austin’s position as emotional and financial prop to a miserable, selfish hypochondriac ...”

“... years and was translated into French.The compiler of the letters, and author of 64 of them, was Herbert Croft, a hybrid figure, part journalist, part scholar, a lawyer and ultimately a baronet. In the 1786 edition of Love and Madness he admitted that only the ‘outline’ of the story was true and that most of the documents apparently cited had been ...”

“... Nine years ago Herbert Tucker wrote an excellent first book, Browning’s Beginnings; like many first books it gave the impression of being a labour of love. Tucker’s second is a tremendous disappointment. It has all the inflated idea of itself that the title suggests. Browning’s Beginnings was short, keen and suggestive ...”

“... all quarters of the globe if he deliberately isolated himself under conditions of siege? On this matter From the House of War provides little help, except for a passing reference to the author’s ‘rather empty title’, which apparently carries important psychological impact when dealing with Iraqi (and other) civil servants, perhaps pandering, in the ...”

“... thing. Especially since those two relatively recent novels – Cotters’ England (1966) and Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife) (1976) – contain extremely important analyses of post-war Britain, address the subject of sexual politics at a profound level, and have been largely ignored in comparison with far lesser novels such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden ...”

“... Abeginning​ is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time ago’ stuff, especially since we’re not talking about the past. The action takes place in the first months of the year 10191. The year is also mentioned in Denis Villeneuve’s new version, which echoes Lynch’s visual style, or at least the visual tendencies of the earlier film: vast buildings, every meeting place a parade ground; flying machines that look like overgrown zeppelins; uniforms and marching that recall the Russian empire or the films of Leni Riefenstahl; battles composed of men crashing into each other, as in the Middle Ages or Chimes at Midnight ...”

“... manages to be inside the experience of dying at the same time as watching it happen on a newsreel. Matter and spirit are not entirely separable: machine-gun bullets ‘tetter’ or rip the ground but are fused utterly with the thoughts they scatter. The ‘barbed loops’ suggest at once barbed wire and, standing as they do so close to ‘salvation’, a crown ...”

“... People must not do things for fun,’ joked A.P. Herbert. ‘We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.’ From its grey, drizzly cover to its century-long plod of standard-length excerpts, Brian MacArthur’s anthology leaves you in no doubt: there’s precious little fun to be had protesting ...”

“... attractive to a reader whose formative experience has been largely Irish.’ Poets like Zbigniew Herbert, ‘neither vindictive against art nor occluded to pain’, or Miroslav Holub, whose awareness of the ‘bounded condition’ of life in the Eastern bloc ensures his ‘inner freedom’, can teach us not to be abashed. The terms of Heaney’s own ...”