“... their lives make excellent biographies. Not only do they suffer in a dramatic way: they do it more purposefully than the rest of us, with our dull sense of un-satisfactoriness, can manage. Sequences of chaos and catastrophe in the life of an artist maudit, which to an eye-witness must appear so messy, pointless and wasteful, are revealed by the historical ...”

“... set of characters. Individuals are portrayed in all their idiosyncrasy, but are made to represent more than themselves. Things are at once unique and exemplary. A belatedly flowering example of the species is The Leopard, in which the slow decay of a Sicilian nobleman coincides with the clamorous rise of bourgeois Italy. In a series of works over the past ...”

“... Contemporary biologists who write for the general public usually have more to impart than scientific information. They have lessons to teach us about how to think of ourselves and our relation to the universe. This is not surprising, since biology is pervaded by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the significance of that theory for our self-understanding remains largely unassimilated ...”

“... with the concept of dignity. But Waldron has an important argument to make, which applies even more sharply to the ideological pandemonium of the United States than to the relatively civilised conflicts of British politics. He believes that the defining ‘circumstances of politics’ are such as to make the legislature, and not the courts, the appropriate ...”

“... possible circumstance to what one wants to happen universally is not a logical one, for there is more than one way of combining such preferences: simple maximisation of expected satisfaction, counting all the possibilities as equally probable, may not be the right choice even for an individual. But more important, the move ...”

“... down Down with Skool! and cry with laughter’, and he first read it when he was ‘probably no more than ten or eleven’. So I suppose I ought to say at this point that I didn’t read it when I was at school, and reading it now I don’t find it hilarious, though it is sometimes funny. People who did read it at school probably think I’m missing the ...”

“... pulling a Virginia Slim from a cigarette packet, that really left an impression. No man was ever more deliberate, from the way he lit and held that cigarette, and followed it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But the thing I carried away at the end of two ...”

“... the night, and that the sound of a motorway is ‘calming’, a ‘soft rush’ rather than the more predictable roar, is a gloomy prospect. Anna is not unlike Katharine. The narrator of The Love of Stones is at one point even mistaken for a tax inspector. Both women are loners; each has a more conventional sister from ...”

“... and feeding tubes, or ask for terminal sedation. Evidently, the same end could often be achieved more quickly and effectively by a lethal injection, so the value of the patient’s well-being does not draw a ‘bright line’ between assisted death and other measures. If we turn to the value of autonomy, we do find a difference. The currently recognised ...”

“... the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his ...”

“... observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt ...”

“... or other, consciously or otherwise, or taking advantage of an illegality by others. Donald Thomas’s book reminds a reader that had he been a retired colonel living in Brighton in 1942, and invited an actress from London down for the weekend, he could have been smartly fined and threatened with imprisonment next time. The reason? The coastal belt was ...”

“... to live a period of his life over again he might choose this one, the last. For Hume, nothing more needed to be said about waiting for death, a subject that we moderns have turned into a veritable genre. The 19th century brought a few memoirs of invalidism, like Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sickroom, which reports on her five-year-long retreat from ...”

“... The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow ...”

“... taking down a shorthand transcript of what is being said, a skill she normally employs in much more exalted circumstances; next week for instance she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only ...”