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“... Johnson, otherwise Parks, otherwise Wigmore, otherwise Brank, otherwise Wilmott, otherwise Williams, otherwise Schutz, otherwise Polton, otherwise Taylor, otherwise Powel, &c &c &c’. It was a commonplace throughout the 18th century that the comfort of trusting people according to how they looked and dressed had given way to a suspicion regarding mere ...”

“... a stalwart of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice Shaw had given him. He didn’t want to deceive ...”

“... and stop asking about the source or ground of obligation. Other Kant-bashing books – notably Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity, an acute and sensitive rethinking of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy – have pointed out that some cultures, notably that of pre-Socratic Greece, enabled people to live very rich (and, if it comes to that, very ...”

“... genres of poems about rural places – ‘pastoral, anti-pastoral, bucolic, eclogue, Doric’, as Bernard O’Donoghue writes in the Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney – and Heaney uses them all, though pastoral and georgic, visionary meadow and labour-intensive hay-baling to him seem complementary, even continuous. Mossbawn ‘sounds very idyllic, but it ...”

“... on such matters, he shows some concern about the way things are going, and expressly approves of Bernard Williams’s neo-Aristotelian ethics; temperance, and for that matter fidelity, might be called, in Williams’s terminology, ‘thick concepts’, like mercy and honour. The prevailing tone of the book is ...”

“... his imprint on the growing movement: Iolo Morganwg. He was born in Glamorgan and christened Edward Williams in 1747. The bardic name by which he is known was not a total invention, for Iolo is a short form of the Welsh form of Edward, Iorwerth, and Morganwg just indicated his native area – ‘Glamorgan Eddie’. He was a marginal member of the culture, for ...”

“... began to attract celebrities to its dancefloor, where everybody was doing the Twist. Tennessee Williams, Merle Oberon and Noël Coward were regulars. Norman Mailer did the Twist with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter. High society enjoyed slumming it, and the socialites, sailors and salesmen sweated it out together in the noisy ...”

“... for instance, are a couple of sentences from George MacBeth on Carl Sandburg: William Carlos Williams broke the grip of the iambic line with more subtlety, but Sandburg smashed it open with greater naturalness. Poems like ‘Skyscraper’ and ‘Cool Tombs’ offer the paragraph as a verse unit in a way that no one had quite done before, not even Whitman ...”

“... before is interesting, and allies McCarthy with all sorts of other writers and critics – Raymond Williams, Doris Lessing and (perhaps most suggestively) Iris Murdoch – who were all talking about something similar at the same time. You can describe it in many different ways, but it comes down to the disintegration of the representative function of ...”

“... As it is we’re confronted with sentences such as ‘I have since moved to Vespasiennes & to Gwyn Williams (but am not responsible for the heading no trousers),’ or ‘the vc looks … more and more like a monk (of the Port-Royal rather than the Tuck Connexion).’ If this is important we should be told what it means, and if it isn’t, or if Heald ...”

“... were laughing and gay.’ Another first-class passenger couldn’t gel his cabin door open. Norris Williams, a tennis player, heard him call out, put his shoulder to the door, and broke it down. An indignant steward, Martha Eustis Stevenson remembered afterwards, ‘threatened to have him arrested for defacing the beautiful ship’. Lower down in the boat, in ...”

“... and achieved some stature of their own: Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography (1980); Ruth Bernard Yeazell in The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981); Howard Feinstein in Becoming William James (1984); Gerald Myers in William James: His Life and Thought (1986); Jane Maher in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry ...”

“... history’s most striking examples of ‘moral luck’, that philosophical oxymoron out of which Bernard Williams made a delphic grace. By accident of military appointments, his hands were clean of the worst that was committed in his time, making him a natural candidate for leadership of the national movement after the war. Personally, he was ...”

“... made it easy, even too easy, to see him in terms of a New York School. (The art impresario John Bernard Myers coined the term with the ‘New York School’ of painters in mind.) School or no school, O’Hara certainly made himself a New York poet: the poems admire and try to mimic the city, where ‘however exaggerated at least something’s going on/and ...”

“... disaster for women: from 27 Deputies out of 491 they will diminish to 24 or 25 out of 577. Shirley Williams please note. What is true for women is also true for the young. The party bosses are naturally more susceptible to the powerful pressure of the senior sitting Deputies than to the claims of younger hopefuls with less bargaining power. It already seems ...”