“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who ...”

“... of Artificial Intelligence, in which Hofstadter takes a line which tackles both the objections of John Searle to the very proposition of machine-based intelligence and the claims of Herbert Simon that such an intelligence is already emerging. But there are many other topics, which take him well beyond the terrain of the earlier books. Some of these seem to me ...”

“... motorways which currently criss-cross pastoral England. One would have to go back to the days of John Buchan to find an English fictional hero capable of squeezing so much fun out of driving a car. Should Cullen blow the gaff on Lord Moggerhanger’s exploits? And could the British social fabric survive their exposure? Life goes on has a plot which hinges on ...”

“... was shortlisted for the prestigious Wattie Awards and now it has won another prize and Norman St John Stevas says it ‘breaks new ground’ and represents ‘an advance in ...”

“... standard pattern, he acquired a well-deserved fame as a moral philosopher and academic reformer. John Maynard Keynes’s jibe – ‘He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was’ – did scant justice to the seriousness of his purpose as he searched for the missing keystone in a universal ...”

“... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...”

“... has to have 41. The two old parties, even now, are but a whisker away. The new one is not. John Curtice thinks that the next Parliament could have about 305 Labour MPs, 151 Tories and 168 from the Alliance. ‘The capitalist vote,’ Brian Walden inferred on his Weekend World, ‘will be divided. Labour will form the next government.’ He was not ...”

“... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...”

“... and when Cuba’s remarkable reduction of poverty was seldom reported. ‘Our’ President, John F. Kennedy, had supported the assault on Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and under his Administration the CIA had tried to kill Castro and sabotage Cuba’s economy. I was pleased, indeed proud, that one of my closest friends in the class was Don Herr, a Defense ...”

“... Allowed to read this work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise ...”

“... States do little to modify the teutonic feel of the book. Barnett is, in fact, the heir of Sir John Seeley, the Late Victorian prophet of a federal British Empire, whose admiration for Prussia led him to the conviction that Britain must develop along the same lines or perish as a great power. The failure of Britain to adopt the German model of a ...”

“... journalism, what is sometimes called ‘the literature of fact’: like others in the field, John McPhee for one, Lopez makes what could be dull textbook material appealing. He displays an almost god-like command of multitudinous fact, but he prevents it from becoming too abstract and lofty by constantly grounding it in personal experience. To ...”

“... to the Arabs because such a compromise would lead to Israel’s death; the second attacked John le Carré for suggesting that Israel might have over-reacted (‘It is as if we British had lost our temper with the IRA,’ le Carré had written in the previous week’s Observer, ‘and decided to punish the entire Irish people once and for all’); and ...”

“... Valeri was blackballed and had to be replaced by an angry Vatican with Mgr Roncalli (later John XXIII). In return Pius XII insisted that the French Catholic hierarchy remain unchallenged. This was clearly impossible: opinion polls showed that a better than eight-to-one majority wanted the collaborationist bishops punished. (Some of them had already had ...”

“... as good as her opponents’ – which is no compliment to anyone. In the background, of course, is John Rawls’s naturalist doctrine of justice as fairness, and also the fear that if you go with Douglas you end up in cultural relativism. She tries to dispel the worry. We do compare systems of justice. As part of their stabilising function they must be ...”