“... discriminating and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to liberalism than others; some ...”

“... that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of Frelimo-style socialism in neighbouring Mozambique. According to Ranger, the disparaging depictions of Zanu and its military wing Zanla were based on unavoidable ...”

“... affected by Charles Maclean’s workmanship in plotting such horror out of forgetfulness. John Le Carré’s new book, The Little Drummer Girl, has an unhappy English actress with radical leanings recruited as an agent by the Israeli intelligence service in order to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist network attacking Jews in Europe. The process of ...”

“... sources. A.J. Ayer, preacher of logical positivism, was small, sensual and irrepressibly witty. John Chinnery, a ‘China expert’, was very young and still in the Communist Party, although his Party discipline was constantly threatened by his merry sense of the absurd (he was to become an inspirational professor of Chinese at Edinburgh). Last, and most ...”

“... and being trusted with a key, we climbed the concrete tower of this 1930s curiosity, designed by Joseph Diongre, in order to catch the morning spread of the city and see the wooded ridge we had to climb in order to get on the road to Waterloo. The church felt proudly ecumenical, as much mosque as white Catholic periscope. The ascent, with spindly ...”

“... with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a raindrop. His ...”

“... facts about Burgess that are known and that matter to his writing. He was baptised a Catholic as John Burgess Wilson in Manchester in 1917, the offspring of a mother who did something on the stage and a father who did something with pianos and perhaps rather more with cigarettes. After his mother and sister died of the flu in 1918 he was brought up by a ...”

“... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...”

“... 1958. Pinter wrote short plays for radio and television, a novel, several screenplays, notably for Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963). The Homecoming (1965) is widely regarded as Pinter’s masterpiece. Among his later plays are Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), Mountain Language (1988), Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes, which opened at the Royal ...”

“... houses could be conceived as an insidious weapon in a ruthless struggle for power. John Kerry raised the issue of climate change twice in his first election debate with Bush, despite the likely absence of any pay-off with undecided voters. Had he prevailed, he would have found allies on Capitol Hill. ...”

“... pretension. Swift’s jailbirds and chimney-sweeps took the place of shepherds and milkmaids; in John Gay’s mock-pastoral The Shepherd’s Week, published a few years after ‘A Description of the Morning’, unpoetic swains and maids sing about turnips, potatoes and the intricacies of cheesemaking. The centrepiece of the second book of Alexander Pope’s ...”

“... other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. But what exactly is the difference, one can’t help wondering while reading such notes, between an interesting allusion or echo and a mere verbal ...”

“... from that of Prime Ministring to this of Authoring,’ Fielding announces with mock pomposity in Joseph Andrews. In a work published just days after the fall from office of Sir Robert Walpole – ‘prime minister’ in a sense that had no constitutional legitimacy at the time, and implied an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent ...”

“... In January last year a directive from John Denham, secretary of state in what was then the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, announced that research funding for universities was going to be rethought.* The new system should ‘continue to incentivise research excellence’ and reward ‘the quality of researchers’ contribution to public policy-making and to public engagement ...”

“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”