“... for the frankness of his self-denigration. ‘Clamence’ explicitly denotes clamans – the false John the Baptist crying in the wilderness: it also, I believe, has overtones of clemency, though in this partial self-portrait Camus in no way spares himself. He set the book as far as possible from the scenes of his equivocal sun-baked epiphanies – not in ...”

“... of President Wilson, the pinnacle of American prestige in the world, and to their reassertion in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural speech. The Senator for New York, as he now is, has served four Presidents, and acted as American Ambassador to India and the United Nations. He is engaging, witty and learned; his prose has the facile deliciousness of Bourbon ...”

“... as a narrative by rendering a complex story comprehensible. Ludendorff, Von Kluck, Joffre, Sir John French, King Albert of Belgium – all come, in Tuchman’s portrayal, to embody the characteristics of the nations to which they belong. We feel that we are seeing a modern morality play re-enacted before our eyes. History takes on a meaning that most ...”

“... normal rates of productivity. Lambert’s investigations in Victorian literature are like the work John Sutherland has issued over the last decade on the publishing history of Victorian fiction: a fresh, vigorous and definite line of attack, which couldn’t possibly occupy the energies of a whole academic establishment. That establishment does not look very ...”

“... of the Radio Age’, and acknowledges the strong effect on her of the annual Box of Delights – John Masefield’s exemplary exercise in quintessential Christmas makebelieve. Is this one source of Angela Carter’s feeling for the fantastic? What she shares with Masefield – the Masefield of the Kay Harker stories anyway – is an ability to locate her ...”

“... sort found in the writings of Spinoza and Kant and represented in our own day by the theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick and others (though these writers differ in how ‘universal’ they intend their principles to be). The essays collected in Morality and Conflict chronicle a movement in the author’s thought from philosophical theory of this kind to ...”

“... were divided, the old party divisions were not yet effaced, but ran through the Coalition (as John Ramsden argues), over Ireland, India and Russia. The politics of the ‘Centre’ were a fiction to which they clung with desperation. Dr Morgan’s history of the Coalition is a stylish and powerful challenge to old orthodoxies. But I remain somewhat ...”

“... effort of honesty and rationality seems to be needed – but the problem is so fantasy-ridden. John Updike’s story ‘Transaction’ in his latest book of short stories shows the prostitution bargain from the side of the male partner: his confusion about her blank availability and boredom, his attempts both to reach her as a real person and to use her in ...”

“... been a continuity of hope for the future, a hope embodied in countless prophetic declarations from John Winthrop’s ‘We shall be as a city upon a hill’ onwards. And of these declarations the Declaration is – and in spite of Wills’s argument remains – the chief. Its mode of prophecy is indeed peculiarly Jeffersonian. And in supplementing previous ...”

“... No politician stands out as a villain in the Gillmans’ interesting series of revelations. Sir John Anderson, blamed over this and much else at the time, in fact fought hard to keep internment to a minimum (and no one denied that some people had to be ‘collared’). If Churchill was a hard-liner in the early summer of 1940, it was not many months before ...”

“... noted such creatures down as dualisers. Dualisers have often appeared in philosophical debates. John Locke invoked baboons or ‘drills’, which are dualisers, in order to show that ‘the distinction of Species or Sorts, is not fixedly established by the real Frame, and secret Constitution of Things.’ Epicurus appealed to bats, which are dualisers, in ...”

“... the recording had been a rush job for George, occupying four days between two singing dates with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. Edward asked him to undertake the job because they had both been collectors of Surrealism. Edward had been a collector of Dali and Magritte on a scale that can be called patronage; George made a faultless selection of Magrittes from ...”

“... about riding-masters, and therefore is afflicted by rentier-guilt. (‘Recurrent as malaria,’ John Lehmann wrote in 1955, ‘a bout of rentier-guilt laid me low.’) Because Auden’s ideal or preferred or postulated reader has this socio-political identity, he is particularly easy to recognise; Trotter’s ingenuity and sensitivity are more taxed when ...”

“... Middle-march. It is no use Gordon Haight’s denying that George Eliot meant to satirise Pattison: John Sparrow has pointed out that in that case it is odd that George Eliot, who was well acquainted with Pattison and his much younger wife, should have chosen to call the author of the Key to All Mythologies by the name of a 16th-century French scholar whose ...”

“... For more than a generation, what Europeans call social democracy and what Americans call liberalism has been the dominant political creed of the North Atlantic world. Its achievements have been enormous. As Ralf Dahrendorf points out in his important and persuasive pamphlet, ‘After Social Democracy’,* ‘it has turned the empty promise of freedom of contract into effective citizenship rights; the welfare state lies at the heart of social democratic politics ...”