“... history that displays her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole ...”

“... person, once launched on adult life? Spurling observes of the biography he produced after the war, John Aubrey and His Friends, that ‘for all the author’s evident respect and affection, its subject never comes to life as Aubrey makes his own subjects do.’ How far can the same be said of her account of him? Good-natured, amusing, affable, to many he also ...”

“... truths. As regular readers of these pages know, philosophers like Colin McGinn, Thomas Nagel and John Searle have no use for Dennett. All of them would agree that he has failed to respect ‘the brute facts of immediate conscious experience’. All of them would sympathise with Roger Penrose’s conviction, as put forward in The Emperor’s New Mind, that ...”

“... inspired respect and even awe, and his personality inspired a great and lasting affection. John Maynard Keynes – who held Ramsey’s gifts as an economist in enormously high regard – has written of his ‘bulky Johnsonian frame, his spontaneous gurgling laugh’ and ‘the simplicity of his feelings and reactions’, which, he said, blended ‘most ...”

“... 1989, of the convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguires resulted in the appointment of Sir John May’s inquiry, which was in part stalled by the prosecution of four of the police officers involved in the case. But when in 1991, piling Pelion on Ossa, the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of the Birmingham Six, the Government was ready the ...”

“... you live. We have, I realise, an inadequate way of thinking about intimidation. Either there is John Stuart Mill Man making up his private mind or someone with a gun at his head being told to ‘vote my way or else.’ But the dominant Third World alternative is that of the ‘mobilised community’. Living in crowded townships or squatter camps, Africans ...”

“... may be objective and natural, not something dependent on what the asserter happens to think. John Locke believed that men were all ‘the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker ... sent into the World by his order and about his business ... made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure.’ But Locke’s was a theory of natural ...”

“... to the streets of Whitechapel as Sinclair knew them in the Seventies. Up from the river comes John Gull, an early 19th-century Essex wharfinger who soon succumbs to cholera. Adopted by a parson and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s ...”

“... distinction. In response to some of Derrida’s earlier writings, some critics (including John Searle) suggested that Derrida did not keep the boundary between use and mention clear. Derrida’s response has been, repeatedly, to show that he is aware of the distinction, and indeed, that he likes to play with it deliberately. This response would have ...”

“... same kind of catalyst for a disturbed individual as Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver was for John W. Hinckley III. The incongruity that so morally intricate and oblique a work as James’s should be exploited only for a cruelly manipulative piece of chicanery counts dramatically, moreover: the sensitive Jamesian Elizabeth, threatened with death from ...”

“... Letters carried powerful charges. Intellectuals of very different origins and interests – like John Locke and Giambattista Vico–cared deeply about the French versions and summaries of their ideas which could bring them to, or distort them for, a European public unwilling or unable to read English and Italian. Unfortunately, like more modern literary ...”

“... Managers and workers jointly resist any attempt from above to extract more effort from them. John Hicks’s dictum that ‘the greatest of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’ may be particularly apt here. Relations between the state enterprise and its immediate political superiors exhibit similar complexity. There is clientelism, in that the ...”

“... of ‘Notes towards ... ’, on disarming criticism by pre-emptive apology. But in the words of John Wayne, ‘Sorry doesn’t get it done.’ Thus he writes, ‘(This really has the makings of a Mills & Boon)’ – but lets it stand. He inserts a footnote in a scene between Philip and his rival for Melissa: ‘It is difficult to render simultaneity in ...”

“... now rarely viewed as anything but positive. In the era of rock and roll and of Philip Glass and John Adams, it seems normal and desirable for music to aspire to be a narcotic. We live in the time of the triumph of the ‘theatrocracy’ that Nietzsche deplored, in which we can find many descendants of Wagner’s favourite dramatic form, the pseudo-spiritual ...”