“... open hostility.’ In some parallel universe I like to think that Max Hastings and Paul Dacre and John Witherow and Alan Rusbridger behave like this. Dominic Lawson may well have said to Charles Moore in some gentleman’s outfitters what Sharon says to Georgina: ‘Well, we can’t both buy this, can we, babe? And I know who looks best in it.’ Both ...”

“... method will be familiar, at least in principle, to readers of Dava Sobel’s Longitude, in which John Harrison the clockmaker is the hero of the urgent but endlessly protracted quest for a method of accurately determining longitude (essential to expanding maritime power). Sobel casts the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, firm believer in the lunar ...”

“... Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Suger, Otto of Freising, John of Salisbury, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Roger Bacon, Snorri Sturluson, Leonardo Fibonacci, Aquinas and many others – was not so very backward. (Moreover, Western Europe had ...”

“... appeal Soviet Communism had for outsiders. He has a blind spot for religion. The name of Pope John Paul II does not even appear in the Index. The effect is to reduce his account of the end of Communism to a story of the triumph of Western consumer capitalism. Given his emphasis on Europe’s darkness, Mazower might occasionally have paused to evoke ...”

“... his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but ...”

“... the same way that heart, lungs and other physical organs grow to maturity. And the psycholinguist John Marshall has drawn attention to the resemblance between this ‘new organology’ and aspects of phrenological thinking. The educational psychologist Howard Gardner has refurbished the old idea that there are distinct forms of intellectual ability, not just ...”

“... and terrified by everything that went on around him, Morell is the sort of figure every decent John Buchan chap loves to hate. (Mr Irving likens him to Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician – could it be his contempt for the Establishment that explains a comparison as inaccurate as it is insulting?) Morell was as well-informed on most aspects of internal ...”

“... the case, and she presents their judgments with some tendentiousness. Counsel for the teachers, John Clerk, whom sources not cited by Professor Faderman credited with at least two natural offspring, is here said not to have diverted ‘himself much with women’; she stresses the conventionally restricted attitudes of all the judges. First, Dame Helen was ...”

“... meetings in his room in the House, where an ill-assorted group – Christopher Price, David Owen, John Mackintosh, Jack Ashley and myself – drank whisky and talked devaluation. When devaluation finally came, I hoped he would become Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he did not, I hoped – incredible as it seems in retrospect – that he would save the Party ...”

“... is a quaint survivor from the world of tentative liberal open-mindedness, rather like the ghost of John Bayley infiltrating a branch of Militant Tendency. Before considering the terminal ironies of this rejection of printed texts, it is essential to examine the history of English as an academic subject. As Brian Doyle shows in the only valuable essay in this ...”

“... When Darwin died a hundred years ago; he could reasonably have said, ‘Après moi, le déluge,’ because we are still awash with books and ideas for, against and about him. The issue is intellectually enthralling, moves rapidly, and is of practical importance. The Monkey Puzzle is about the origin of man, and, in particular, about the date when the line which led to us separated from that which led to chimpanzees and gorillas ...”

“... believe that they do not, and nor, I suspect, do they, we do not know what else to say, or how. John Grierson’s cheery utilitarianism, let alone his muscular contempt for most features (‘Now that the fashion in storylines goes for the various deviations in domestic and personal derangement, it may be best to leave women to deal with it’); Cesare ...”

“... of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother John Lehmann, poet, and fructifying editor and founder of the London Magazine. Most sensitive, literate girls write out the agonies of growing up, at least in private poetry or prose. But from such a family as Rosamond Lehmann’s, one writes to publish. In an ...”

“... the eyes of the puritanical biographer appears to be some redemption. Her first husband was named John Koontz. Joan Givner grapples gamely with the task of talking about plural Koontzes in the possessive and brings it off. Katherine Anne Porter was born in Texas. The family’s great friends were the Schlemmers. Their way of life is described as ‘very ...”

“... but it is not the straightforward utilitarianism that was later to be propounded by Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Haakonssen objects to Hume that he does not explain how our sympathy can extend as far as the operation of the sense of justice would require. Adam Smith surmounts this difficulty by having recourse to the fiction of an impartial ...”