“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... for them. As lovers they are inept, incapable of communicating human warmth. Their prototype is John Coetzee, the subject of Summertime (2009), the third in Coetzee’s triptych of ‘autobiographical’ novels. Its metafictional conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer, writing about him in the 1970s when he was still making his way as a ...”

“... its wonderful detail. And yet I always feel that it’s with the Adoration of the Kings that the Christian story begins to go wrong; that the unlooked for display of material wealth and the shower of gifts, for all their emblematic significance, are a foretaste of the wealth and worldliness that were to ensnare the medieval Church; and while the ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ...”

“... life, he said, we need something or someone to give us a purpose. Yet that sober old empiricist, John Stuart Mill, once said that simply on the basis of experience, no one would ever arrive at the existence of one god – and, it seems to me, certainly not a god of goodness – but at polytheism. Indeed anyone living in the ‘world’ (in the ...”

“... defended the letters’ authenticity; a few assigned them to various forgers; but others, notably John Benton and D.W. Robertson, held their sole author to be Abelard, who they said had channelled or even invented the passionate, unrepentant Heloise to point up his success in converting her. As the later epistles demonstrate, she was indeed converted, or at ...”

“... of American magazines and the man on the omnibus had ‘some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever’. In Crossroads, a man ‘in the vitamin business’, Franzen’s idea of a regular Joe, buys ‘the recent Mailer, the recent Updike’. Free from the ‘total electronic distraction of our time’, Franzen’s people keep their minds on higher ...”

“... from dead ancestors, burlesque (‘as I neared my pudenda, it seemed that it was no longer me but John Indian who was caressing me … a pungent tidal wave flooded my thighs’) and an imagined meeting between Tituba and Hester Prynne. Condé describes the book as ‘the opposite of a historical novel. I was not interested at all in what her real life could ...”

“... his reinstatement on the Navy List is promised. Despite such plots O’Brian’s Aubrey novels, as John Bayley has said in this paper, are ‘emphatically not adventure stories, or the sort of mechanical marine thrillers which sprang up in the wake of C.S. Forester’. For one thing, delicacy and generosity of feeling are constant themes in O’Brian’s ...”

“... Malcolm Rifkind were visibly at odds with New Right doctrine even before the change of government. John Major himself is, of course, an unknown quantity, but the opposition parties have succumbed to wishful thinking in assuming that he will be a carbon copy of his old boss. Thatcherism was always an aberration from the norm of advanced capitalism. Major may ...”

“... metamorphosed into radical democrats, Ukrainian nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists or Christian mystics, so will the Conservative Party not be the party which almost unanimously supported Mrs Thatcher’s legislation (including the poll tax) until at the eleventh hour the normally docile backbenchers realised the electoral consequences of their ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”