“... of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the ...”

“... New features could be introduced without any sense of anachronism, rather as a new picture may be hung in an old house. ‘Britain’ itself was still a semi-mythic construct, supposedly the creation of the Trojan ‘Brut’, descendant of Aeneas, and Brindle keeps the particularities of Scotland and Ireland in view. Scotland, though it would have its ...”

“... are two problems with these accounts. First, the test of Orange Herald was held on Friday, 31 May: it would not have been physically possible for the story to appear before the following Monday. In other words, the journalists wrote their stories in advance of the test, on the basis of a briefing from Brigadier Jehu, who had seen the first test – Short ...”

“... both an astute moral purchase and a great sympathy for Highsmith. I wish I could say the same of Richard Bradford’s new Life, Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires. As the ill-advised title might suggest, the book is a sad mess: shallow, mistake-ridden, voyeuristic in tone. It’s hard to get through for a number of reasons. Tellingly, there are no scholarly ...”

“... It may surprise those who do not already know it that the world centre for the study of the life and work of Bertrand Russell is at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Shortly before he died Russell sold his vast collection of manuscripts and personal papers to McMaster for a huge sum of money in order to finance the various projects of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation ...”

“... be as secure as ever, especially within and radiating out from academic circles: that is, if one may judge by the number of recent books, articles, monographs, studies, memoirs and so on listed in the Bibliography and Notes of this impressively thorough record of the life and work of one of the most disconcerting novelists in the history of fiction, whom ...”

“... controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy place, seize ...”

“... to speak was attacked by Communist Party goons and one of his friends badly injured.On 15 May 1946, a year before his death, he suffered what may have been a mild heart attack. ‘I was suddenly seized by one of those oppressive dizzy spells that have been striking me very frequently of late, and which weaken me to ...”

“... proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful ...”

“... time in France with one of the people who was to contribute generously to the fund, the painter Richard Wyndham. Sitting outside a café in Toulon, he told Wyndham that he was a ‘Narcissus’ and probably a ‘bugger’. People, Wyndham remembered him saying, are only friends insofar as they are of use to you. Lewis, it seems, did not so much bite the ...”

“... was to be uniquely human. The worst worry is that the machines will refuse our orders, that they may acquire a will of their own, and want free agency. You start out with some matter-of-fact presumptions about what each sort of entity really is. If you’re reading this piece, you’re almost certainly a person, and you assume that its other readers are ...”

“... interest is often key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when ...”

“... Humphrey won the party’s nomination at a chaotic Democratic National Convention. And finally, Richard Nixon demonstrated how many second chances there are in American politics by winning the presidency only six years after telling reporters, following a humiliating defeat running to be governor of California, that he was retiring so they wouldn’t have ...”

“... admirable characteristics. No one esteems anyone else simply for being possessive, even if they may envy the power which some accumulate under the goading of their will to possess, or may enjoy and admire the skills which others develop at least partly under the same impulses. To own, to have at one’s disposal, to ...”

“... ongoing affair with the English heritage. Mr Johnson’s volume on British Cathedrals may be in a well-established tradition, but it has unusual features. His criterion of selection is simply that a building must have been, or become, the seat of a bishop. Thus St Albans and Peterborough, Norman abbeys ‘episcopalised’ respectively in 1877 and ...”