“... out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse ...”

“... at a Spanish public. (Lorca’s works are listed here only in their Spanish editions.) For an English reader, it may be helpful to remember that Lorca remains a mythical figure in Spain, and it would no doubt be a biographer’s coup to offer definitive proof of his sexuality. Moreover, as Gibson (himself now a Spanish citizen) acknowledges, there is no ...”

“... his new book’s title a certain resonance.) At the same time, Austin’s fastidiousness with the English tongue was ‘an essential half of what my father despaired of for himself (eloquence was the other half), who possessed by the time I came into his life no ordinary language, his Russian and Polish fragmentary, his Hebrew primitive, his Yiddish ...”

“... Three or four years ago, a friend of mine was asked to illustrate a Teaching English book for the Ministry of Education in Cairo. He was (is) an Egyptian, but an Egyptian from outside officialdom – a cartoonist. He painted a series of charming and instantly recognisable street scenes: stacked green-grocers’, lemonade vendors, decked-out taxicabs, dust-carts pulled by donkeys ...”

“... the years since 1978. Romola herself had allowed a portion of the notebooks to be translated into English and published in 1936, in an edition from which she excised most of the erotic material, a great deal of the obsessive repetition, and all the execrable poems. Until now, all translations into other languages were made from that ...”

“... language in which it could have been done. The selection of his poems in German, with the fine English versions of Michael Hamburger, has just been issued in a revised edition with some forty new translations. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is itself, in a sense, a voice out of the war, in which the philosopher has conducted himself with suicidal ...”

“... that is sought in sexual connection.’ The only tolerant remarks about homosexuality made by an English intellectual to have survived from the early 19th century are Bentham’s. But the Utilitarians are more often yet another stumbling-block for the seeker of sexual free spirits in the period. James Mill’s belief in the felicific calculus, and disdain ...”

“... is easy to come by: the author of ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ is also the author of ‘To Richard Lovelace’, and of the vitriolic assault on the literary reputation of Tom May. Even by itself, the Horatian Ode is not easy to read: why, for example, did he hope Cromwell would be ‘to Italy an Hannibal’? Hannibal was on the wrong side, and ...”

“... the blow of phrase upon phrase, their cause as chancy as their end. John Bayley, the most English of critics, looks for truth by resorting to foreign parts of it. Or by subjecting home truths to the stress of foreignness. Russia and the USA are his main resorts, the one for fulfilment, the other for provocation. But his criticism has always enforced a ...”

“... Such information had in fact survived antiquity, and much of it had already been translated into English, but the required texts concentrated on war, politics and ethics. Now, by contrast, the life story of the notorious courtesan Neaera, with its episodes of gang rape, blackmail and fraud, is parsed, discussed and analysed in the first-year Greek book used ...”

“... descended on Atkinson. A man from the Daily Express asked her to explain what Post-Modernism was; Richard Hoggart, chairman of the Whitbread judges, said that Atkinson had written a Post-Modern novel, but might not know it. (She did the whole thing absent-mindedly, perhaps, while polishing brass doorknobs.) The Daily Mail sent a woman who found the author ...”

“... constrain the individual: history, imperial grandeur, Classicism, high culture – even villages. (Richard Hofstadter once explained how the ceaseless lure of land inhibited the growth of village settlements and led to the habit of continually pulling up stakes.) Repeatedly, in diaries, journals, letters, ‘official’ histories, promotional tracts and works ...”

“... Ionce​ asked the great historian Richard Southern whether he would like to have met any of the medieval saints and churchmen about whom he wrote so eloquently. He gave a cautious reply: ‘I think they probably had very bad breath.’ He may have been right about that, but it would be wrong to infer that this was something which didn’t bother them ...”

“... was embraced by communist scientists in the West, above all by Haldane (who wrote a preface to the English translation of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature) and by the crystallographer J.D. Bernal in his 1939 book The Social Function of Science. By then, however, Stalin had dragooned science and scientists in the USSR into following a rigid party line, and in ...”

“... pointed out that most of its victims suffered from diseases that were neither new nor rare. As an English word ‘asthma’ goes back to the 16th century. And when Sherlock Holmes in the ‘Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ (1903) greets John Hector McFarlane, who has just burst unceremoniously into 221b Baker Street, with the words ‘you mentioned your ...”