“... Even those determined to assimilate – like the successful businessman who buys one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing the day he was murdered, and religiously slips it on every evening – are torn between Vietnamese and American customs. The stories skilfully trace the dilemmas and pains of immigrant experience, and they also constitute a wide-ranging ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... with a legion of flies, before returning to pose the question. The first part was answered by John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State at the time of the misbegotten federation. ‘From the point of view of justice,’ he said, ‘the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless the strategic interests of the United States ...”

“... There were closer friends who shunned him: Beardsley, for instance, who owed him so much; John Gray, an early lover, for whose Silverpoints, prettiest of Nineties poetry-books, Wilde had paid; Lilly Langtry, to whom he had, at one time, brought a daily lily, and who claimed to have sent him money without having actually done so. Beerbohm did not spurn ...”

“... for figurative language is a feature of his style, and also a pointer to his critical interests. John Ashbery’s poetry is said to be ‘like an electrotherapy relieving the stiff neck of the sublime, and helping our numbness to speak’. Does our cultural plight put us in a madhouse or a massage parlour here? Hartman is thinking about his style, not our ...”

“... had mentioned but not dwelt on in the first volume would be the hallmark of democratic societies. John Stuart Mill, who had complained that the one weakness of the first volume was a confusion between the effects of political democracy and those of social and economic equality, now saw more plainly how Tocqueville’s anxieties linked them – and promptly ...”

“... addresses his girlfriend as Angel Drawers. In other words, he’s a cross between Keith Talent and John Self, a London yob whose conflict with the South American wilds is bound to produce much mirthful copy and rich scope for fatso-baiting. Stockton certainly lives up to his role, screaming for tomato ketchup in the middle of nowhere, sulking in his ...”

“... to national character were largely an aspect of political abuse – a view spelled out in one of John Stuart Mill’s earliest essays in the Westminster Review and defended all his life. Professor Deane is equally scrupulous about distinguishing one antipathy and its objects from another. In the early stages of the Revolution, émigré priests were made much ...”

“... Hume correctly. As he remarks in his preface, others are onto the same interpretation, notably John Wright in his The Sceptical Realism of David Hume.) But, as I observed above, a philosopher’s actual words are seldom sufficient to deter a reading that fits contemporary orthodoxy (c.f. Wittgenstein). I would make only two criticisms of Strawson’s ...”

“... imposes but the disorder of a collection like Cosway’s, the more studied clutter of Sir John Soane’s Museum, or the accidental poetry of the shops of the antiquity brokers, or ‘nicknackitarians’, which may have most excited the historical imagination. It is no exaggeration to say that next to nothing was known about the London brokers before ...”

“... As a title for this gathering of essays, Just looking is as engagingly unpretentious as its contents, and yet misleading. Lavishly illustrated, sometimes with pictures that aren’t actually discussed (by Hopkins, Poe and Oscar Wilde), apparently effortless, occasional, these pieces are freighted with the chronic preoccupations evident since the beginning of this intelligent writer’s long career ...”

“... of an embryonic system of select committees – has been credited largely to Norman St John Stevas. So the diaries must remain his monument. But what a monument! If I ever meet Dick again – perhaps in some heavenly version of the Members’ Lobby – I think I could honestly assure him that those remarkable volumes are a more significant ...”

“... be both apt and marketable. Dabydeen and all other poets who sometimes use dialect might relish John Agard’s ‘Listen Mr Oxford Don’ (‘mugging de Queen’s English/is the story of my life’). This poem is intelligent and funny, yet it risks boxing itself in by marketing a stereotypical speaker who is a sort of licensed clown: Me not no Oxford don ...”

“... shaped by Lincoln, Carnegie, and King to the republic of exclusion prophesied by Cotton Mather, John D. Rockefeller and George Lincoln Rockwell. The mask was accepted by Dylan, but worn more lightly. In ‘Lo and Behold!’ it floats just in front of the singer’s face.The most delicate and intense of the basement songs are like a play about the old ...”

“... from their father than they themselves ever raised or gave away. In The Black Book, the radical John Wade opined that the Crown was the premier beneficiary of the nation’s benevolence – a view, Prochaska notes, ‘which had much to recommend it’. Throughout her reign, Queen Victoria received many legacies as well as intestate estates in the Duchy of ...”