“... that ‘what seems to be the fragmentation in philosophy found at the end of the 20th century may be due to more than the institutional imperatives of specialisation and professionalisation. It may be inherent in the subject itself.’ Philosophers used to think that the point of their discipline was to attain a ...”

“... from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed ...”

“... portrait of Lamb – and Oldman’s portrayal of him – is a careful balancing act. He may look, and sound, most of the time, like a washed-up ex-spy, a broken man, alcoholic, overweight, chain-smoking, abusive, sexist, racist, the world’s worst boss. But we mustn’t forget that earlier in his career he spent many years behind the Berlin ...”

“... public’. Ordinary MPs and the press thought they had a better grasp of popular opinion, but they may not have done. This was a serious matter: if the government was to take the people along with it, it had to know how they felt and what kinds of appeal they would respond to. It was with this in mind that in December it set up a brand new Home Intelligence ...”

“... Despite​ Theresa May’s calls during the election campaign for national unity, Britons don’t really live in a nation-state but in a multinational composite state, whose lineaments were set in the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and the Hanoverian accession in 1714 ...”

“... about seven thousand taken prisoner, while the British had 449 killed and 1241 wounded. It may be that Mr Keegan, a military historian, was not the ideal person to write about Trafalgar: his notions of a brace and many other things belonging to a sailing ship are imprecise, and in speaking of Nelson’s plan of attack, aimed at breaking the enemy line ...”

“... which he calls Uniqueness, has been less noticed in recent philosophy than the other three, but it may be what most attracted Putnam in the first place. After a decade and more in which pragmatists, relativists and other kinds of anti-realist have been so busy maligning the three theses of Independence, Correspondence and Bivalence, it is good to have the ...”

“... in Britain after Thatcher, an amazing proportion of national treasure invested in the sciences. It may be spent unwisely on weapons or on grandiose enterprises like the human genome project. It may be necessary to do a lot of toadying about practical applications of pure research when asking for patronage. But public and ...”

“... interest themselves in the “economic and social forces which underlie the history of people” may overlook.’ Here the situation is a little different. There is a historian of Antiquity who has argued lucidly and at length on the possible relationship between early Greek commerce and coinage, and the capacity for abstract thinking which found ultimate ...”

“... and a rationalist, who never lost his equilibrium.’ Rationality, we are invited to conclude, may be good for you in doses but can wither the spirit; beyond a certain point its study becomes the province of moral pathology. It has not always been thought so, but there would be few dissenters nowadays. So when David Pears writes of his book, Motivated ...”

“... power of the raped and dying woman’. So the work is not as tightly composed as Donaldson may wish it to be – although this is not the defect he may fear it is. The parts of the book are unequal, since Lucretia has all the thunder (St ...”

“... might have brought him a bull of excommunication as a birthday gift. Even an improper noise may call forth uninvited guests, unfriendly critics: the explosive start of Inside Mr Enderby is a fart, succeeded by ghostly mutterings: PFFFRRRRUMMMP.   And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr ...”

“... in leather manacles’ – in other words, a slave, or at least a servant. The wondering layman may think that if you believe that, you will believe anything, but etymology somewhat resembles theology: given the initial act of faith, the logic of the argument is irresistible. In this case the philological reasoning is indeed quite sound, but the pleasure of ...”

“... I “know” that I have lost something irrecoverable.’ This is an outrageous story: but one may admire it for that, for its mischievous invention, and for its limited awareness of such gestures and proportions as a baby might truly have observed. It brings to mind what Roth said about his revered Heine: ‘Maybe he did make up the odd fact, but then he ...”

“... supposed ‘goals’ of the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946-56, the realisation of which may be seen in A.L. Morton’s The World of the Ranters and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, these and other historians wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn ...”