“... is just a prop on a stage set. Far from wishing to satirise the society which her characters may be thought of as representing, Murdoch scarcely acknowledges its existence. Her attentive gaze is fixed on deeper realities: the fundamentals of the human condition, which she thinks of as cutting across and below the contingent map of wealth and class. The ...”

“... prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly’. But it opens with great generosity, even warmth. I begin with its opening passage, having changed a word here and there, in order to suggest that Oxford has its continuities: Few English literary theorists command more ...”

“... you were born. If you don’t remain there, but retain some of your native accent, your identity may be partially defined by ambiguous relations to places, class positions and the sounds of your own voices. Many people’s speech is unstable in just this way, and when poets are congratulated by reviewers for having ‘found a voice’, I wonder whether their ...”

“... discovered on temple sites, we find this (written backwards) in the sacred spring at Bath: ‘May he who carried off Vilbia from me become liquid as the water; may she who so obscenely ate her lose the power of speech ...’ (eight suspects are listed, five men and three women). The evidence available for the study of ...”

“... a crucial role in legal interpretation. Those who disagree with him on the substantive issues may be tempted to charge that his theory of adjudication is just an excuse for reading his own moral and political preferences into the law. One of the many virtues of his new book is that it enables one thoroughly to examine and to dispose of that ...”

“... certain way, made a particular decision. Indeed, in many real-life situations even that inference may go too far. One of Kahneman’s more disconcerting results suggests that people’s valuations can readily be manipulated if before making their estimate they are primed with an irrelevant ‘anchoring’ number. For example, subjects asked to guess ...”

“... in the UK in 2017 after a van drove into pedestrians on London Bridge. So the prospect that IS may still fight on remains a live concern around the world. Americans and Europeans may not care what happens to the Kurds, or who rules in Damascus and Baghdad, but they do worry about IS – because IS is a threat to ...”

“... icon of English history. We have a number of accounts of his death, all of which differ. What may well be the earliest version (though not all historians agree) has him cut down by William himself, together with the author’s local lord and his nephew. This is the least likely to be true. The second earliest source contradicts all the others by recording ...”

“... to suggest that the figures relate to hard currency rather than human beings. Which, indeed, they may. For those bold spirits who continue to produce CDs of New Music in the traditional Modernist sense, such sums are unimaginable. Content with worldwide sales of two or three thousand units, overjoyed with the occasional nine or ten, and disappointed only when ...”

“... you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind.” ’ ‘American-style’ may be a hint that in the writer’s opinion Macdonald deserved this put-down, for being an Anglophile American if for nothing else. I find it hard to believe she really takes this view, but whether she does or not, the remark she reports might still provoke an ...”

“... a first in PPE. He there began a research degree in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Hegelian he may have been by choice, but he was at Oxford during the postwar glory days of ordinary language philosophy. That shows wonderfully in the correspondence. Life was not easy on him. He was for many years a Communist, not so terrible a thing in those days for an ...”

“... Fifteen thousand candidates contested 545 seats in the Indian lower house, the Lok Sabha, in the May General Election. Four hundred million of the 590 million who were eligible to do so voted. It was the largest election in history. Yet it might have seemed odd. The Congress Government has been introducing far-reaching reforms ...”

“... classics would continue to mark much of the scientific project throughout the long modernity which may or may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the ...”

“... is to be communicated; nor with the situation of others to whom the information or opinion may relate; nor with the situation of those who desire information and cannot get it, or who need information which they do not know exists, or whose lives and possibilities are blighted by silence or lies. Do they have anything worth calling a right to ...”

“... jokes – or the wrong kind of unseriousness – is unlikely to inspire confidence in a reader who may already feel compromised by the fact that he is reading such a book: is he an earnest saddie, one of those people who needs an explanation for everything, and particularly his pleasure? Books that explain poems, or dreams, or even sex can add to our pleasure ...”