“... those who loom large in this pantheon are Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Dewey, Cavell, James, Davidson and Derrida. At its best, Rorty’s writing has energy, humour, great tolerance, an exemplary clarity that can illuminate even the darker reaches of Heidegger, and above all a rare ability to communicate enthusiasm and sheer love of ideas. At its ...”

“... their educational and economic outcomes. This was the second such study; the first, led by James Douglas, followed nearly 14,000 individuals born in the first week of March 1946. By 1981 Butler was running the project with Mia Kellmer Pringle, an educational psychologist born in Vienna who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in the 1930s (Pearson ...”

“... Peacock began in the examiner’s office in 1819, working under the Scots economist James Mill and alongside John Stuart Mill (who had been brought into the company by his father in 1823) on a starting salary of £600, which rose with various promotions. It reached £2000 when Peacock succeeded James Mill as ...”

“... in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ‘goddesses’ of ‘Proportion’ – in effect, compliance with the status quo – and ‘Conversion’, a desire to subdue and control. As Hussey points out, this passage constitutes a rare intrusion on the part of the ...”

“... highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan Review?’ ‘You ask,’ Phillips replied. ‘I’m asking,’ she said, and, open sesame, she was in. The ...”

“... of her to jib at the word ‘stream’ when May Sinclair, writing of her novels in 1918, used William James’s ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe them. ‘Pool’, she thought, would have done better. She began writing Pilgrimage in 1913, the year when The White Peacock and Du Côté de Chez Swann were published and a year before. Dubliners ...”

“... endured because we respond to his sense that life is a game, but one that might be won. In 1481 William Caxton translated a Flemish version of the epic and printed it as the History of Reynard the Fox. Most of the 97 books Caxton published on his press in Westminster were works of chivalric literature or religious piety, but he probably found room for the ...”

“... have never belonged to the living world, and lacking in the energy and discipline of his writing. James Methuen-Campbell, as the title of his biography of Welch implies, holds a higher opinion of the paintings; and one of the valuable features of his book is a detailed catalogue of them. His is certainly a sober and well-informed biography, a shade less ...”

“... practices of writing in a political light. Her book develops the subject and historical method of James Boulton’s very good study of 1964, The Language of Politics; her cunning play with his title means that she sees the politics as much more pervasive. Even before the French Revolution, books proliferated on grammar, vocabulary, and the history of language ...”

“... Collectors’ fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio ...”

“... then in Cuba; a couple of years in England, where he made a deep impression on Conrad, Henry James and others; final illness and death. The chief woman in Crane’s life, Cora Taylor, belongs to the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches and a wooden ...”

“... as he stepped up his battle of words. Pound sought advice from the Berlin-based Nazi propagandist William Joyce (an Irishman known to his British enemies as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’) about effective broadcasting techniques. Maintaining he was the authentic voice of ‘United States heritage’, he made clear his particular opposition to ‘Churchill and ...”

“... Chinese curse: they live in interesting times and discover that they have an interesting history. James Belich’s volume – the first of a projected two – is the most remarkable product so far of the historiographical re-assessment with which New Zealanders have been challenging their sense of themselves. It should remove them from the wings, and place ...”

“... and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when King Alfred is supposed to have burnt the cakes – but on reflection one wonders whether it isn’t ...”

“... and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William Buckley’s conservative bastion at the National Review to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its ...”