“... apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was what went on in Cambridge. Ayer read Wittgenstein when hardly anybody else in Oxford thought of doing so. But at Ryle’s suggestion he gave up the idea of sitting at Wittgenstein’s feet in Cambridge and instead went to Vienna to work with Moritz Schlick – this at a time when hardly anybody ...”

“... of clippings’. The ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ can best be read as the jottings of a Jewish communist who will shortly swallow a massive dose of morphine rather than fall into the hands of the Nazis. The fragmentary structure of the text reflects the ruined history from which it arises. All this brings to mind the ...”

“... long before the growth in autobiography, the popularity of the Bildungsroman encouraged people to read novels as realistic narratives which must have drawn on their authors’ lives; Jane Eyre, subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, is one example, David Copperfield another. The Brontës tried to conceal their identities behind the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and ...”

“... to do a little background research. It was super-easy to find things out. I went online and read about Balaklava. It wasn’t long before I put ‘Lord Raglan’ into a search engine and soon I was listening to an 1890 recording of Tennyson intoning ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. I was able to read the words ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking contrast to hers in both form and content. Serra is Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog exemplified in heavy metal: Louise Bourgeois is the fox, an artist of many devices, to borrow a Homeric epithet which suits her perfectly ...”

“... had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit that Richard Branson is the first citizen of choice, according to opinion polls, for the unavailable post of president of UK plc. If boosterism and gee-whizzery were Leadbeater’s only faults, I would wish him luck and pass his book to the Oxfam shop. In normal ...”

“... personality in various interludes and ‘interchapters’. He is, he admits, no Holmesian (Richard, not Sherlock) ‘pursuer’ of his subject. But he offers a vivid account of a visit he made to Kensal Green Cemetery as he began work on his biography. It was December (the month in which the novelist died): Thackeray’s grave on the south side, where ...”

“... scrutiny. There are many stilted passages in the Voice series (e.g. when Orwell turns to Herbert Read and asks, ‘Read, will you read us a bit of your autobiography’) and – a black-mark for a talks producer – he allows L.A.G. Strong to use ‘infer’ when he means ...”

“... Is he like other men?’ His apostles made sure that Newton’s compatriots, not all of whom read Latin and few of whom could follow the proofs, were properly in awe of his mathematical analysis of the motion of bodies on Earth and in Heaven. Halley, for one, pulled no punches. Forget about Moses and the Ten Commandments, the inventors of writing or the ...”

“... at any level from the molecular to the cellular to the entire organism and its behaviour. Richard Dawkins extended its definition by asserting that the dam a beaver builds is part of its phenotype.) Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... before, when they were both eleven, and who now ran a tea plantation in Java, proposed by letter. Richard Turpin, on the other hand, had the advantage of being present in the flesh, and after a six-week acquaintance duly ousted the tea planter. Turpin was gay, which made for a tepid courtship on both sides. ‘Molly had been converted to Catholicism by ...”

“... utterly irrational rage. I shall not repeat here the uncouth popular idiom which says as much ... [Richard] Hofstadter himself acquired the dogma from such ‘Frankfurt School’ followers of avowed arch-conspirator Georg Lukacs and the sometime OSS and CIA agent, sometime Communist, and active conspirator Herbert Marcuse, who used to begin his lectures with ...”

“... a clear debt of influence to the chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde. It was based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, a leftist notorious for his risqué subject matter, and as one of the first pieces of chamber music to try to tell a story it riled the more conservative wing of the Viennese critical establishment. In the poem, a woman confesses to her lover that ...”

“... them at all. This gloomy picture of political decline will come as a surprise to those who have read any of the recent books attacking the religious right. At least half a dozen of these have appeared from major publishers in the last year: the list includes polemics by the likes of Kevin Phillips as well as alarmed reporting by American journalists like ...”