“... if she was going to teach and she said: ‘Good God, no. I’m going to be a writer.’ ‘Mr Prior,’ she recalled, ‘thought I was a spoilt arrogant hussy – which I was.’ It was at the end of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that ...”

“... of fiction that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...”

“... the alternative of making a non-rational choice? Dr Küng’s answer to this question rests on a prior thesis about what he takes to be an even more fundamental universal human choice, the choice between nihilism and what he calls ‘fundamental trust’. He approaches his characterisation of this latter choice by drawing upon the views of certain modern ...”

“... two decades on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the ...”

“... of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible. Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I will ...”

“... of like-minded right-wingers had taken for their exclusive use. Yarosh had been chosen as leader; prior to that he’d headed an organisation called Stepan Bandera Trident, the trident being Ukraine’s national symbol. ‘People say we’re terrorists, extremists,’ he said. ‘In fact we are nationalist revolutionaries. There’s nothing extremist in ...”

“... it. But practically (and this is his first-rate triumph) we don’t think much about it. Henry James is not the first writer to have been impressed yet baffled by Pierre Loti. Anatole France, who called him the ‘sublime illiterate’, believed that, of all their contemporaries, he was ‘the most sure to last’. To his peers Loti was a distinct ...”

“... was eagerly sought by colleagues running for re-election to the House and Senate. In the weeks prior to the polls, he travelled back and forth across his uniquely large constituency in support of Republican candidates. In the event, most of the Republican Senators in danger of losing their seats duly lost them. Reagan’s energetic campaigning on behalf of ...”

“... Gerty, was at the end of Leahy Road in Sandymount. It is where, reputedly, on 16 June 1904, James Joyce took Nora Barnacle on their first date, when she slid her hand down inside his trousers to move his shirt ‘softly aside’. With hindsight, Joyce saw something in that moment (eyes closed, eyes open): a kind of crux in his life, the fact that his ...”

“... the time (or knowledge) to fill; slips of paper with notes like ‘pray remember to looke upon Mr James Harrington’s life: upon my alterations there’; marginal references to ‘quaere iterum’ (‘inquire again’); and references to a crowd of other texts with which Aubrey’s writings are always chattering. Often, in fact, what he is doing is not ...”

“... together in England’. Yet during the lifetime of its members, who also included the engineer James Watt, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the Society was barely visible in print. No learned memoirs appeared under its auspices, no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the ...”

“... realism about perception that he shares with such of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how ...”

“... of them. I even have to will myself to watch modern film or TV adaptations of Dickens, Trollope or James, and when it comes to Jane Austen adaptations, I refuse. This is not because I’m an anti-television snob. I watch TV and box sets of popular drama series in greedy excess. Westerns, thrillers, political, medical, legal and science fiction are welcome even ...”

“... back in Tonight, a book as explicit as late Yeats or late Heaney in its return to the poet’s prior work. There are also recurring character types: during the late 1960s, guerrilla warriors; during the 1970s, female explorers, daring their way two by two through the harsh unknown. Then and now, there are also would-be male allies ultimately left ...”

“... religion is all about, all the diverse ways in which it continues to move millions. When William James gave his lectures on the varieties of religious experience, he wasn’t speaking of boxes full of anthropological data, but of lived experience. Of course it is important to test the hypothesis that prayer reduces stress, or that old people are ‘more ...”