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“... urban safari park, I was robbed at knife point in Brixton. The frog who dared to croak is Richard Sennett’s first novel and umpteenth book. Like other philosophers (Russell, Wollheim, Scruton, Koestler), he evidently sees fiction as something he ought to chance his arm at, once at least. I’m no judge, but his social-philosophical writing (notably ...”

“... for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of ...”

“... academics might seem an unlikely topic for him. He found out about their work after the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein suggested in a joint review of Moneyball that the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the baseball team the Oakland Athletics, could be read as a case study in support ...”

“... reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception bizarre, baffling or psychotic. In ...”

“... he became senior prefect in his house. In 1941 he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to read classics; he spent the last year of the war in the Intelligence Corps, working at the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi. A child of Empire, then, and beneficiary of all the privileges bestowed by an élite education; his family was wealthy, his mother a ...”

“... the meticulous administration which lay behind the glamorous crusading enterprises of King Richard Coeur de Lion in the 1190s, leaving him at least king of Cyprus, if not of Jerusalem. The Pipe Rolls of the English Exchequer, in the National Archives at Kew, are great clumps of feet-long parchment, which I remember from my research student days as best ...”

“... historical contexts. A.A. Long’s recent book on Epictetus, like the work of Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji on ancient philosophical therapy, reminds us of something lost in the modern academy and not at all prominent in Kenny, but regarded by all major Greek and Roman thinkers from Socrates on as the heart of the matter: the idea and practice of ...”

“... are not singled out. In a review of The Culture of Death in the American Journal of Bioethics, Richard Zaner complains that he was ‘utterly missing’ from Wesley Smith’s ‘rants’, that he was ‘not only not interviewed and not cited, but not even mentioned in passing’. Albert Jonsen reacted with similar indignation. In a review of Smith’s book ...”

“... Gray. Even the Irish Protestant Iris Murdoch’s darkly fantastic fiction makes more sense when read against this background. In fact, from the late 18th century onwards, there is a rich seam of Irish Gothic writing by women, from Regina Maria Roche and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) to Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde) and Elizabeth Bowen. If they were solidly ...”

“... sides of the paper at the same time. It was quickly adopted for printing the Times. The New Yorker Richard M. Hoe designed a rotary cylinder press which spat out millions of pages per day, and steam engines began to be used in paper mills, replacing waterpower. The discovery of chlorine in 1774 by a German chemist working in Sweden meant that coloured rags ...”

“... was more than just a tyrannical thug. He could be self-deprecatingly humorous, and was deeply read in Arab and foreign literature (Hemingway was a favourite). Once, catching a TV presenter in a grammatical error, he phoned the minister of culture to complain, decreeing a six-month suspension for the offender. His own literary efforts occupied an ...”

“... now. So you’ve revived him.TP: Well there we are then. Cheers. [glasses clink]GP: No one would read Mallock now if it wasn’t for A Humument.TP: Well, he [Mallock] did write a book that is still respected in philosophical circles. But as a novel … he’s not a bad writer. There’s not much in his life, so to speak, that has gristle and muscle. In the ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... them where appropriate. It is one of the finest works of philosophical scholarship I have ever read. The period of Russell’s thought covered by Griffin has been ill served by commentators, not least Russell himself, who dismissed his work from this period briskly and unfairly in My Philosophical Development: he describes his fellowship dissertation of ...”

“... books. Among these embattled mega-opuses, with their Faustian intellectual imperialism, are Richard Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903, briefly mentioned by Gay), Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the 19th Century (1906), Spengler’s Decline of the west(1918and 1922), Ludwig Klages’s Spirit as Adversary of the Soul (1929-1933) and ...”