“... political and moral concerns in a larger framework of theoretical understanding. Such a programme may at present seem too abstract to be useful. Spinoza touches interests in contemporary philosophy at two principal points: first, in his theory of the mirroring relation between the activities of a person’s mind and the activities within his ...”

“... indeed she suggests that high-risk technology applied to art is an Anglo-Saxon vice. She may be correct that the solvents available to the restorer today are more powerful than those formerly employed, but her claim that the modern methods are generally more drastic than the old ones is highly misleading. This is especially obvious when we consider ...”

“... What will she do when she has lost me? Will she lead a life of ascetic austerity? There may have been wish-fulfilment in the praise for her independence, but he was right about her ascetic austerity. This biographer is incurious about both the costs of her devotion to her father, and the costs the rest of the family must have paid. What about the ...”

“... personalities, as temperaments – indeed, they hate each other’s fledgling identities – they may not be able to distinguish each other as separate physical entities. What Hume said of all of us – that we are mirrors to each other – was true for them, but with a bizarre inflection: where for us the gaze of the other confers on us our sense of ...”

“... lot of hungry ghosts – the ghosts, she tells us, of her novitiate training. Thus, soul-searching may be followed by soul-chewing. Before the 1960s, flagellation and hairshirts weren’t uncommon in convents; you had to sleep lying flat on your back, without sheets or pillows, and with blankets that went to the laundry once a year. You spent a lot of time on ...”

“... people to afford measured necessities of food, clothing, shelter? But if we speak only of that, we may neglect a fundamental part of deprivation: the inability to participate fully in society. Should we then be concerned with relative poverty? But if we were wouldn’t we end up with the almost empty proposition that the poor are just those who have less than ...”

“... Harold Macmillan elevated Tom Dugdale to the Peerage, he was telling the world that Parliament may have got the right answer, but that in doing justice they had blackened the name of a good man and that that had to be put right. The age of chivalry was not dead. Once again Harold Macmillan had lifted the veil and permitted us to understand why ...”

“... by accident lit a fire with a five-pound note. She, incidentally, practised a Scottish habit which may well now be extinct: eating porridge not sitting down but on the hoof, wandering about her house with bowl and spoon. These were the years of David’s adolescence. While acknowledging the universal temptation to remember only sunny days, he proclaims his ...”

“... hospitable, we will stay with him: if otherwise, we will mount our horses and ride off.’ Nomads may be closer to the created world of God, but they are not a part of it. A nomad proper is a herdsman who moves his property through a sequence of pastures. He is tied to a most rigorous time-table and committed to the increase of his herds and his sons. It is ...”

“... boys. There is more to Dumas than Professor Hemmings allows. But there is also the danger that one may read too much into Dumas. Thus we are told of his visit to England in 1857, a stay which was carefully arranged so as not to coincide with an English Sunday (an earlier visit had impressed on him that this was something to be avoided). He visited Madame ...”

“... when it was new, those who grew up with it, and those who delight in it now for its period flavour may find it so for different reasons. Not that rooms with Duncan Grant prints, curtains patterned in some variation of amoeba and dart or chevron and dot, and Isokon furniture, were very common: the section on photojournalism makes that clear. It sensibly ...”

“... have been living on their nerves, reading French encyclopedias and meditating greatness. Mulready may have painted privies, but he had more than an inkling of such matters. He shows the variety of the old guard of the Royal Academy. Burlington House was more flexible and welcoming than the myths would have it, as the rapid success of Pre-Raphaelitism ...”

“... was not a stimulus for imagination. Indeed, he said to Osbert Sitwell that ‘any talent I may have was due to a long illness as a boy, which afforded me time to think, and to subsequent ill-health, because I was not allowed to play games and so had to teach myself, for my enjoyment, to use my eyes instead of my feet. My brothers hadn’t the same ...”

“... are most vigorous and consistent, is by far the best of the London novels. In the end, it may not ‘explain’ that much about London life, but it communicates something just as interesting in its naughty, amoral fantasy (and it has the power of a dream) of BBC editors and civil servants being turned on to sex, drink and brawling by black ...”

“... a house which can also accommodate Nicholas when he is not living with his mother in New York. In May I went back to America to receive an honorary degree from Bard, a small Liberal Arts College at Annandale on the Hudson. I had taught there for one day a week in 1948, as a means of supplementing my salary as a Visiting Professor at New York University. I ...”