“... Oxford philosophy was a competitive business; there were certain prizes that one had to win, the John Locke Prize, the All Souls Fellowship; but Ayer’s fate was to be pipped by his contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin, Goronwy Rees and the slightly younger J.L. Austin. As an undergraduate he had been taken up by Maurice Bowra and acquired a certain celebrity by ...”

“... and finally to expand that notion of interaction into the genres of autobiographies.’ In 1993, John Sturrock could say in The Language of Autobiography: ‘there has never yet been an autobiography addressed to a readership of literary theorists.’ Now it looks as if that time is upon us. The general reader, it seems, is left out of the loop, save as ...”

“... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...”

“... is doing something for the first time in recorded history, and she will have no successor until St John; and her effort raises a profound metaphysical question. Then what is she trying to do, and what is the question? She is trying ‘to speak ... out of eternity’. The phrase is unusual. But the contrast with Creon’s ‘temporality’ hints at an ...”

“... conversion to co-operatives of conventional enterprises – the kinds of conversion introduced by John Lewis into his stores in 1929 and into Scott Bader in 1951 – and in the establishment of completely new co-operatives, a good deal more is possible than might be imagined. Although those who first have the idea and first risk their money are apt, not ...”

“... kiss, Africans copulate’). This thorough conspectus of the continent invites comparison with John Gunther’s Inside Africa, a survey done in the last days of colonialism, and, until events overtake it, The Africans should stand, in succession to Gunther, as the most accessible and comprehensive overview of the continent. The twenty-odd years since the ...”

“... a poet was over, though he continued to work on, and eventually published, his translations of St John of the Cross, which many consider his most important work. In 1952 he moved again, this time to Portugal, and there, in 1957, he died in an automobile accident, in a car driven by his wife. Campbell has been called a Romantic (though he himself disliked the ...”

“... the timber that is consumed to fire them.) A name that crops up in both sets of letters is that of John Wain. Wain in 1962 wrote to the Guardian about MacDiarmid: ‘He is simultaneously truculent (to Whitehall) and fawning (to Moscow). He simultaneously praises some hog-wash written by a Government hack in Budapest and thumbs his nose at the Americans who ...”

“... on conclusions reached in the book I had written. I don’t want to interfere with a discussion by John Bayley which the paper will be publishing shortly: but I would like to diarise a little about this piece of Antipodean duality. Like other strange stories of the genre, it both embodies and attracts coincidence. A strong pang was felt when my eye travelled ...”

“... Roberta Goren’s book should be compulsory reading in every course of peace studies. It explains in great detail how the USSR after Stalin’s death adapted to the nuclear age its strategy for achieving hegemony in a world dominated by the mass media and by weapons of mass destruction. It was a dual strategy, with an upper and a lower face. The brightly-lit upper face comprised the campaign for peace and disarmament, promoted by Communist ‘front’ organisations; the darkened, lower face involved the use of very different means to achieve the same end without provoking nuclear war ...”

“... strife under Vichy and the Nazi occupation, have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the ...”

“... some years later, but not in both periods. It is, for example, as if Keats perished and John Clare went mad so that their contemporary, Carlyle, could emerge. Babbage was older than any of these men, but he did not conceive his Difference Engine until the year of Keats’s death. Strangely, the two were educated for a time at a pair of ...”

“... demands. The investigation into the paradoxical nature of the poetry is urbanely continued by John Wilders, who takes issue with L.C. Knights’s depreciating distinction between the Metaphysical poets and those of the Restoration, as the difference between a poetic inquiry into the complex, contradictory nature of man and the simpler, Hobbist, empiricist ...”

“... or in the light of episodes concerning, Scottish writers, mostly of the 18th century: Tannahill, John Wilson of Greenock – and, in ‘Green Breeks’, a famous anecdote of Scott’s boyhood is subjected to an extremely deft and somewhat mean-spirited reversal. The volume as a whole gives a sense of substantial and sensitive gifts embarrassed by a strange ...”

“... activity with the minimum of state interference necessary to protect third parties. He discovered John Stuart Mill, and warmly applauded him. Wills’s trilogy spans forty years of British gliding: but it is the first twenty that fire the imagination, and On Being a Bird that captures it. That famous flight from Heston to St Austell in 1938 is described in ...”