“... the abstract with the concrete’, yet at the same time he insists that ‘the mind has laws, powers and principles of its own, and is not a mere dependent on matter.’ Hazlitt admired Lamb because his friend’s ‘love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal.’ ‘Taste’ in this context is both an accomplishment and an ...”

“... and opportunities for friendship with educated men and women, and had won the respect of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. For six years – his longest stay in one place – he had occupied a respectable flat on the edge of Regent’s Park. As if compelled for a second time to kick away his chances of success and suitable companionship, Gissing ...”

“... he told me that thanks to the Nigerian bomber he had been visited by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman, having asked his questions, went back to the US and told his readers that the city ‘was not Kabul … yet’, but that AQAP was a ‘virus’ that needed urgent attention before the spread of the disease became uncontrollable. He ...”

“... Conventional criticism allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and ...”

“... gives short shrift to this larger story, and misses how remarkable it was that these two imperial powers, in the middle of the Second World War, agreed to rewrite the rules of global capitalism to make the world safe for the interventionist Keynesian state. The convocation of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, where the Keynes-White deal ...”

“... of state. Legal historians tend to shrug at this gross violation of the very separation of powers that Montesquieu and Madison purported to admire in the British constitution; but, even at the time, the crossover between justice and politics was a cause of concern: Poser quotes the comment of the Public Advertiser in 1777 that ‘a man clothed with the ...”

“... books); the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed ...”

“... wrote in one of his essays for Bute. In particular, he had a clear understanding of the balance of powers, ‘where one part of the legislative body checks the other by the privilege of rejecting, both checked by the executive, as that is again by the legislative; all parts moving, and however they may follow the particular interests of their body, yet all ...”

“... weight on the invariable quality of Defoe’s writing. The authors make a number of claims for his powers: they admire his ‘improvisatory’ sentences, by which they mean something like the attribute Boulez discovers in Debussy – that is, ending up a phrase, a sentence or a paragraph in an unforeseen way, as opposed to the ‘forward planning’ of ...”

“... replay of the old tradition which counts the killing of the victim as one of satire’s archetypal powers.) Many details of Hardy’s account are placed in a densely informative context of recorded folk practices: ‘the din of cleavers, tongs, tambourines, kits, crouds, humstrums, serpents, ram’s-horns’, the parading of effigies of the victims, the ...”

“... this was 1968, and Forty Years On was one of the plays on his desk when the Lord Chamberlain’s powers expired and stage censorship was abolished. There were other jokes, equally bad but more ‘satirical’. At one point Field Marshal Earl Haig strode on, in bright red gloves: ‘As you all know, I have just this minute returned from the First World ...”

“... examples and connections, from Shakespeare and Sterne to Kafka, Borges and Muriel Spark. The powers of artifice, of code and convention, exert a claim which should at least give us pause in the drive toward ‘deep’ interpretations of motive and meaning. ‘Sterne goes shallower than that,’ as Josipovici artfully puts it. His case is argued most ...”

“... against the over-mighty state was once regarded – by such men as Sir William Blackstone and Thomas Jefferson – as a crucial function of the jury, elevating it to a high place among the defining institutions of a political democracy. For Alexis de Tocqueville the American jury was an ‘eminently republican element in government’ which ‘places the ...”

“... the gallows seems to have declined in the present volume, perhaps another index of flagging powers, and the febrile priapism that used to accompany the deaths of others seems also to have receded. But the affair with M.C., which had been triggered by the forensic frisson of a criminal trial, ended in a deliciously morbid amalgam of guilty nightmare (for ...”

“... that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ In Murdoch and Nagel I think we find the genuine spiritual impulse or ...”