“... at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no strings attached.) Edward Kamau Brathwaite is also familiar with that circle, having carried off a Cholmondley Award in this country and a ...”

“... discussion papers and now taken up by these two books is for a minister of culture. Norman St John-Stevas was Minister for the Arts and a cabinet minister, but the duality was, like a seat on the Arts Council, personal to him. When Mrs Thatcher sacked him, the minister for the arts resumed the status of a junior minister at the Department of Education and ...”

“... profession and the other asylums of London (especially Hoxton) when necessary. Lamb’s brother John had urged him not to take on this task: it was typical of Lamb to say that he understood John’s reasons for saying this, and thought no less of him for it, while disregarding his advice. The history of the fate of insane ...”

“... doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to solitary complacency. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander has recently unfolded a contrariety in Chapter 26 of the Book of Proverbs: Answer not a tool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Each of these ...”

“... the traitors. Perhaps the most memorable story of all is that of the woman at the meeting held by John Kensit, the Protestant reformer, as he considered himself, or ‘rabble-rouser’, as Dame Rebecca calls him – all too accurately, as he was later killed in a riot of his own provoking. At question-time the woman rose very diffidently to ask a sincere and ...”

“... been done already, only much better, by King Vidor in a motion picture called The Big Parade, with John Gilbert as the son who returns to mother from war a mutilated man. The movie was made in 1925 and it was straight fiction. Now Garcia Marquez tells it again but as news from the Falklands front. Blind soldiers who phone unknowing mama only to learn of her ...”

“... the sentence ‘unacceptable’ to speakers of the language. For example, in the sentence ‘John loves Mary,’ ‘loves’ may be replaced by ‘hates’ or ‘eats’, but not by ‘but’, ‘thinks that’ or ‘swims’. Now consider another example, discussed at length by Barthes in his Eléments de Sémiologie, the example of the menu. A man ...”

“... pain’, though he adds that, if it is true that ‘classical utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mill used “pleasure” ... to include achieving what one desired’ and vice versa, then ‘the difference between classical utilitarianism and utilitarianism based on interests disappears.’ In fact, achieving what one desires is not always ...”

“... that survived in the 1720s were the people who adopted the label as a form of self-assertion (Sir John Hyde Cotton of Madingley is an obvious example), men who had absolutely no intention of risking so much as a farthing on the cause; and those who, like William Shippen, used it as a title for their disgust at the mechanisms and ethos of Whig rule and who ...”

“... teaching, and which might therefore be approved without apparent inconsistency. Second, Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958 as a ‘caretaker’ pontiff, had surprised everyone by encouraging Catholics to re-examine many aspects of their faith previously regarded as sacrosanct. In 1962 he called for a second Vatican Council to reinterpret the Catholic faith ...”

“... at least, some of the most thoughtful and independent observers would persuade us. One of them is John Felstiner, whose book about Neruda was reviewed in LRB a few weeks back by Christopher Reid.1 Felstiner some years ago wrote an essay that I for my part found arresting and persuasive, in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by ...”

“... has used his scholarship to write an exceptionally wise biography called Menlove – the life of John Menlove Edwards, one of the strongest and boldest climbers between the wars and the chief explorer of the cliffs round Llanberis and the Ogwen valley in Snowdonia.* Edwards was a psychiatrist in Liverpool, noted for his success with difficult psychosomatic ...”

“... of Mount Desert Island and about its history, from Champlain who named it in the 17th century to John D. Rockefeller, but he still can’t accept it as a real place. When she talks of her friends, he asks: ‘Do they come even to a place as out-of-the-way as this?’ As if exasperated, she replies: ‘Let’s not rehash the myth of my solitude yet ...”

“... contenders would still be left in the field with no way of making a case for one over another. John Rawls’s conception in A Theory of Justice of a ‘veil of ignorance’, blotting out all information that is (according to Rawls) morally irrelevant, would be one construction, but an inherently controversial one. The upshot is that rational argument comes ...”

“... brief late letters, which come sandwiched between a chatty domestic bulletin and a letter to Sir John Wolfenden about a BBC radio talk, is compounded by their common recall of Forster’s time in Alexandria, where he spent the First World War in a quasi-military capacity working for the Red Cross. Each records the surprising re-emergence of something long ...”