“... inviting us to an altogether more elevating conversation between C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (There is, as Cavell nicely describes it, a raging ‘thirst for talk’ in all these films.) We are hearing about the natural aristocracy that democracy needs. We are hearing about how to find what Matthew Arnold called one’s ...”

“... conclusion that nobody knows, it is all a matter of taste, and not even literary taste. She quotes John Press: ‘the divergences over Edith Sitwell are inseparable from the personal, cultural, social and educational principles and prejudices which have inspired them.’ It is not really as bad as that. A rational argument about Edith’s Sitwell’s poetry is ...”

“... by Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and sundry other eminent sex-sleuths. But there is no shaking Mr John D. Perry and his two assistants Beverly Whipple and Alice Kahn Landis. In photographs, they seem a cheery, well-adjusted trio, but there is, it must be said, something a bit dubious in Perry’s self-profile: he is ‘a psychologist (licensed in Vermont), a ...”

“... or more mass meetings. I estimate that I have spoken in more public halls than either Gladstone or John Bright did, if only because some of the halls were not built in their day. After about two years I ran out of cities or great towns to visit, and I also ran out of steam as to what to say. I was delighted at the prospect of celebrating the beginning of my ...”

“... to do at an Anglican service: MacDonald was much at sea and missed some of his cues. Then came John Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw, presumably the literary kings of the time. Galsworthy behaved impeccably, doing everything absolutely right. Shaw got enjoyment by looking around most of the time. The next pair were Edmund Gosse and J.M. Barrie. Barrie had ...”

“... The Edwardians, it is well known, were great worriers. If it was not the national physique or the Teuton menace they were worrying about, it was the ‘warped vitality’ of Bank Holiday crowds, or it was bicycling. I have always been rather struck by the warning against bicycling issued by the Liberal historian R.C.K. Ensor: ‘The nervous craving of modern people for soulless and thoughtless exhilaration sufficiently explains its deplorable vogue, which will last until the stronger natures set a saner example ...”

“... zone when she is shot by a frontier guard. Before this I had tried Reds, a film allegedly about John Reed. This film had only normal intercourse. It also had a good deal of political nonsense and little hint that Reed wrote the finest account there is of the Bolshevik revolution. I have been cured of film-going for a long time. I have not done much better ...”

“... a rapid, clear account of the main events of the war. Since he is a consultant surgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, as well as an amateur historian and a collector of photographs, he comes into his own in his account of medical consequences both of the fighting and of the handling of the civilian population. There are graphic descriptions of ...”

“... argument inexorably leads to a restatement of the question posed by Himmelfarb’s 1974 study of John Stuart Mill: what happens to societies if Mill’s spectre of a moral majority is replaced by a culture whose only categorical requirement is that everyone must disagree with everyone else? What happens if the mothers at whose knees we learn the rudiments of ...”

“... anything other than the continuance of affection and regard. In December 1881, Browning wrote to John W. Field, a friend of his and the Storys’, of a recent trip to Venice: ‘Had the Storys – all of them – been where we expected to find them – why – the arrangement would have been too perfect: I rejoice to hear they are well.’ 6 The ...”

“... this fate, and few may know that the familiar expression has a nautical origin. According to Sir John Richardson, as quoted in the OED, it happens thus: ‘when through a shift of wind or bad steerage, the wind comes in front of the square sails and lays them back against the masts, instantly staying the inward course and giving her stern way, an accident ...”

“... the Russell-Coteses had collected, such as James Archer’s Henry Irving as Charles I (1873) and John Collier’s Lewis Waller as Monsieur Beaucaire (1903), were really very fine. I had also begun to feel defensive about genre painting, which seemed to be eminently respectable when executed by 17th-century Dutchmen but was otherwise bafflingly taboo. Was it ...”

“... early history of species ‘bagging’ in North America. Every ornithologist will know the name of John James Audubon, but there were many other impressive pioneers in recording life on the continent. I hadn’t realised the extent to which Thomas Jefferson, for example, engaged in speculation about the affinities of fossilised mammoth bones that had turned up ...”

“... in the work of several of the philosophers Putnam approves of (in particular Stanley Cavell and John McDowell). But the trouble with that strategy is that nothing ontological follows from the fact of entanglement. Apollo was much entangled with the forms of life in ancient Athens; but if there isn’t any Apollo, then there isn’t. It is not a defence of ...”

“... so outraged by her pursuit of pleasure. The absolution and reverence that came to the novelist John McGahern from the penitent monsignors who used to persecute him has yet to be granted to Edna, though I expect it will come. It may not last till the millennium, but for the time being at least, the curse of the Catholic Church no longer carries as far as it ...”