“... 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 ...”

“... to that of an analyst to his patients: cultivated negative capability. But negative capability, as John Bayley has frequently pointed out, cannot, by definition, be cultivated. Absence consciously striven for becomes conspicuous. A Late Divorce has no controlling narrator, but Yehoshua is present on every page of it: as the man performing the vanishing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to ‘a monkey house at feeding time’. It was in the same year, 1951, Deane tells us, that John Montague, also writing in The Bell, called for an end to the apathy which seemed the predominant feeling about cultural matters, and at the same time ‘demanded of his generation that it reflect Catholicism as a living force in Irish life’. His ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than a gentleman (one of his favourite distinctions), a competent professional of modern spirit. John Kennedy was already dead, but the New Frontier spirit seemed to be alive in the Britain of 1964, and Harold Wilson to exemplify it. We believed him, or some of us did, when he said that he would get Britain going again, bring in new people, harness new ...”

“... of Tennyson’s rhyme of ‘abysm’ with ‘Zolaism’. The first page of the introduction to John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse moves at once from saying that ‘the true condition of Irish poetry in the 19th century’ is ‘mutilation’, to ‘Loss is Mangan’s only theme,’ this sentence then speaking of castration in a way which is grimly ...”

“... They didn’t have the partinost, or ‘party spirit’, of friends like James Klugman or John Cornford. To put it crudely, the CP in Britain was beneath them. They were unwilling in the end to leave the Establishment, and became prominent figures in the BBC, the Foreign Office, Intelligence and so forth – just as they were destined to. Except that ...”

“... elected governments can be defeated, or even overthrown, by extra-parliamentary producer groups. John Stuart Mill’s conception of representative government has not lost its inspirational force, but the participatory, libertarian values underlying it run counter to the ethos of the modern centralist state, and the questions it raises are subversive, not ...”

“... pack up and go home. She will like the illustrated edition of Priestley’s English Journey. John Hadfield, the picture editor, has found photographs – some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of ...”

“... none of that, and it is very bad (differently bad) if this is because they pinioned his arms. John Ruskin wrote to Charles Eliot Norton: ‘So, I know perfectly well that you would work for five years, to write a nice life of me; but I don’t care about having my life written, and I know that no one can write a nice life of me, for my life has not been ...”

“... real, and not necessarily especially ‘moderate’, if that is taken to mean weak. For instance, John Passmore’s Man’s Responsibility for Nature puts forward a spread of alternatives, all of which call for quite drastic action. But it is moderate in that it always gives its reasons, treats opponents honestly and respectfully, strongly objects to ...”

“... and a Parliament no more than a necessary rubber stamp to confirm its conclusions. To a man like John Selden, on the other hand, the notion of a ‘representative kirk’ could do little more than make him cry ‘Praemunire’: to the English, whether Presbyterian or not, the Scottish notion of a General Assembly appeared an entirely unwarrantable ...”

“... as the true source of his ‘hypochondria’. Even the spectacle of resignation frightened him. John Reid, one of his clients condemned to death for sheep-stealing, proved so passive and indifferent when Boswell went to see him in the Tolbooth condemned cell that he tried to hire a ‘resurrection’ gang to take Reid’s body from the gallows and attempt ...”

“... The leading figures in all these books are well-known, and are located in a period of conspicuous intellectual activity in the Scotland of the mid and late 18th century. This was the time when the modern social sciences were created as areas of legitimate study, much of their content for the use of teenage university students. There was also a modest literary revival ...”