“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... As Songs of the Doomed so spectacularly illustrates, Doc’s the first American writer since John Dos Passos to tap the eroding and elemental fury within the American Dream and make the compost picture of American society in the last quarter of the 20th century work so elegantly on paper. I discovered two curious things about Doc’s writing when I was ...”

“... fallacy. ‘We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions,’ drily remarked John Negroponte, a rough-stuff artist if ever there was one and a veteran of Cambodia and later of Honduras. (Mr Negroponte was to offer his resignation from Kissinger’s team a few years later over the Cyprus crisis. I once asked a close relative of his what ...”

“... have something of the malign energy one later finds in the children of Lord of the Flies or John Dollar. Woolley is right, and indeed a bit cautious, when he says that ‘Sheridan distorts Moryson’s account in some details.’ When Swift came to write A Modest Proposal less than year after Sheridan’s paper appeared, he went beyond Sheridan and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... jumped straight on a train to Nashville, there to meet with her friends-and-collaborators-to-be. John Crowe Ransom, then a key member of the Fugitive group, tells the story of what happened next. Undoubtedly we were rather absurd in the way we received Laura at Nashville – prim, formidable and stiff. What she came for was human companionship of the most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the end of it the mystery has been cleared up, The Assault has been spoken of by some – by John Gross, for example – as, on one level, like a detective novel. The resemblance, however, is weak. Anton Steenwijk does not seek out explanations for what happened on that terrible January night in 1945, they seek him out, unbidden and, consciously at ...”

“... A hoodlum’s job done by honest men. With us, you only kill for reasons of state.’ This is the opinion of Maurice Robert, research director of the French secret service (and later Ambassador to Gabon), as recorded by Faligot and Krop in their excellent and well-researched book. It is difficult to accept such a verdict on the DGSE (originally the BCRA, then the DGER, then the SDECE ...”

“... others have covered it adequately, but he is not short of material, having had access to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (where Hadley’s letters, alas without Ernest’s thousandfold replies, are stored) and many other major collections; indeed all the biographers appear to have been received with unusual generosity by the Hemingway family and the ...”

“... because Kissinger had effectively brought the opinions of the South African Prime Minister, John Vorster, to bear on the issue (Meredith is particularly good at describing this), and because of sanctions. Economic sanctions against Rhodesia were in the end, and in their way, a success. They did not achieve what had been initially hoped for them, because ...”