“... of certitude. The number, if not the quality, of such commentaries is now increasing steadily. Jacques Bouveresse’s minutely analytic examinations of Wittgenstein on mathematics and on formal logic are an encouraging instance. The second possibility was that of an entirely frank biography, of a ‘life of Ludwig von Wittgenstein’ which would deal with ...”

“... many readers to the prescience and accuracy with which it skewered the early years of Thatcherism. Martin Amis’s Money, which also mingles social satire with sexual excess, even if of a slightly more joyful kind, is often held up as the 1980s political novel par excellence, but it contains few passages which anatomise the spirit of that decade with Jock ...”

“... much more intimate our conversations would have been if I had spoken their language’. (As Jacques Derrida, a Jew from Algeria, put it: ‘I have only one language, and it is not my own.’) Memmi escaped the camp, and after the war went to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. When a rumour spread that, as a Tunisian ‘native’, he might not ...”

“... friend. Murdoch brings her friends, Schopenhauer, Simone Weil, Anselm, Hume, Wittgenstein, Martin Buber, but above all Plato. Perhaps you will warm to her book only if most of her friends are your friends. This has little to do with philosophical doctrine. I happen to be an entrenched nominalist and don’t for a moment believe in Plato’s Ideas or ...”

“... imitations of Eugène Atget, and his attempts when in Africa to be more like the great Hungarian Martin Munkácsi, were unpromising. Then came Surrealism – or an attempt at it. A curtain wrapped around a head, a shirt hanging upside down on a washing line like a ghost, animal entrails arranged into abstractions: photography, for those who take a principled ...”

“... Manner (1814-15) is a collection of essays and stories written in homage to the French engraver Jacques Callot, known for his capricious, grotesque style. A description of Callot’s ‘manner’ in the preface sums up Hoffmann’s intended method: to capture a ‘shimmer of a certain Romantic originality’ through the use of spirited, bold forms. Night ...”

“... smiling. Tordjman’s daughter, Louise, seven, peeks out from behind her five-year-old brother, Jacques, who looks resolutely into the camera – that is to say, at us. All the Tordjmans were captured at a UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de France) home in the South of France on 20 October 1943 and deported to Auschwitz on 28 October. But who is the ...”

“... council under the thumb of central government and placed in the hands of an elected mayor. Jacques Chirac looks back fondly on his time as the city’s first Mayor and still uses the mayoral suite as his private residence. Indeed, he remained Mayor of Paris throughout his time as French Prime Minister and resigned the post only when he replaced ...”

“... cinephile – so long as you allowed popular cinema back into the story. This was understood by Jacques Rivette, the former Cahiers critic who became a leading figure in the French New Wave. In an interview in 1998, Rivette said that he tried to ‘stay attentive to all the greats and also the less than greats’. He spoke about his original canon ...”

“... misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such ...”

“... or lingered on in different ways for different people. A couple of years earlier, in a letter to Jacques-Laurent Bost, Simone de Beauvoir had pronounced it ‘less and less likely’ that Hitler could want a war. Now she took the news that the summer examinations of 1940 had been cancelled to be ‘definitive and without hope’. St Exupéry’s friend Léon ...”

“... the difficulty of his writing, although his essays are certainly no more difficult than those of Jacques Derrida, or than every third article in the Journal of Philosophy. They are, however, difficult in a different way from both Derrida and technical analytical philosophy, and his book calls on one to formulate a typology of philosophical difficulty, to ...”

“... the Netherlands and, especially, England. Elizabethan voyages of exploration, like that led by Martin Frobisher to search for the Northwest Passage, or Humphrey Gilbert’s ill-fated trip to Newfoundland, made some modest gains (in knowledge if not in wealth). But mostly they conformed to the Spanish and French tragedy of errors model. In 1578 Frobisher ...”

“... an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each other. Afterwards I ...”

“... by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often ...”