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“... a series of footnotes to Plato, then it must be equally true that the philosophical writing of the English-speaking peoples consists chiefly of ‘problems from Locke’. Not moral philosophy, for sure, but examinations of what we know, how we think, what there is, what a person is. It is astounding that Locke should have had this power. It is no surprise that ...”

“... that generation) had some kind of needle about the virtual sanctification of T.E. Lawrence by the English (Monck was Liverpool Irish). Doughty was for him (as for Lawrence) a kind of bible about the desert, a witness of truth against later romanticisers of ‘the Aarab’. Whatever Monck’s mixed motives, the introduction was unmixed gain for me – though I ...”

“... which gave the Scots their world stage, has disintegrated, Scots Toryism been demolished by its English counterpart and the self-consciously Scotch or kailyard school of literature regained the ascendancy. In England, or at least in the metropolis, John Buchan evokes that primordial English resentment that is the reward ...”

“... writing this strikes a direct connection between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt ...”

“... to be talking about Dante, Shakespeare and Martin Amis.’ The text of the Time Out feature by Richard Rayner, one of the most impressive of all the discussions, is also a study in contrasts, containing a highly unillusioned portrait of Amis’s public personality alongside an intelligent and generous appraisal of his novels.The star fiction-reviewers were ...”

“... a character so definite as to constitute something real and singular. Certainly, an event hit the English stage for the first time around 1600 that not only revolutionised revenge drama but made a difference to a powerful amount that has been written or staged since. It’s an interesting fact that theatre people don’t speak about the ‘play’ they’re ...”

“... Ben Jonson is remembered as a master of English comedy, but you would hardly think so from his portrait. The earliest dateable likeness is the engraving by Robert Vaughan, done in the mid 1620s, when Jonson was around fifty. The face is jowly, bearded, dour, heavily lived-in. The shadowed eyes remind me of photos of Tony Hancock ...”

“... food faddists. He can be caustically funny about their lunatic fringes, whether vegetarian (the English chemist Halliburton described beef tea bouillon as ‘simply an ox’s urine in a tea cup’), carnivorous (Dr Salisbury urged a diet containing three pounds of meat a day), masticatory (retired businessman Horace Fletcher recommended 50 chews per ...”

“... Sassoons, one wonders, to catalogue its journey down that profound dull tunnel? Nancy and Richard Newell’s book suggests that they do, quoting a poem by a Soviet paratrooper who was killed in Afghanistan more than a year ago, a young man who wrote to his lover about his own future death: He did not live beyond the hour before dawn He fell on his ...”

“... poets for not getting their facts right. The most notable of these is the great Classical scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742), who judged the poets by the standards of his own rigorous 18th-century rationalism; a good many people have remarked that his edition of Paradise Lost, in which he used the theory that the text has been interpolated by an amanuensis ...”

“... Sir, The quicker Richard Branson sells Virgin Railways and moves on the better. The last two occasions my wife has had the misfortune to use his wretched railway she has been 60 minutes and 110 minutes late. We are sick and tired of his artificial smile (it reminds us of Mr Blair’s) and his publicity forever in the press and on television ...”

“... somewhat circumscribed by the succession. ‘Long live the revolution,’ he said, practising his English. Then we settled down for his three-hour address, which was being broadcast live. Occasions like this always make me wish I’d brought a picnic basket. The speech was pretty typical. Some facts (for example, that the increase in oil revenues brought ...”

“... loyal of friends. He’s a half-breed and a bastard. Part Vietnamese and part French, he speaks English with an American accent. He’s good at getting banged up, consigned to the hospital bed, the bin, the re-education camp, a dank basement or an empty warehouse staring into the barrel of a gun. He’s the offspring of paedophilia. He’s lonely, often in ...”

“... Certainly the history of what actually happened in the war has only just begun to be written. Richard Overy’s impressive overview is a reminder of how poorly the English-speaking reader has been served with histories of the war on the Eastern Front. Although it was of a far greater order of magnitude than the war in ...”

“... and pirates, as the Company’s French, Dutch and Portuguese rivals pointed out, were always English. The Company’s profits fell, their splendid dividends (50 per cent or even more) dwindled, and the shareholders saw that trading might have to cease. It was not surprising, therefore, that Bellomont was able to induce several of the most important ...”