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“... ago we had Bertrand Russell: The Psychobiography of a Moralist by Andrew Brink, a lecturer in English at McMaster who helped to edit Volumes I and XII of the Collected Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a similar genesis, although in ...”

“... US Embassy, ‘is that there’s lots of money for voter education. The bad news is that we hear Richard Gere and Kim Basinger are coming out to spend it.’ ‘It’s getting like the late Sixties in Vietnam,’ said his colleague. ‘Last time I saw so many people working such frantic hours on politics. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference there in the ...”

“... problems, and apparently Young is one of them. He has sampled a number of prominent contemporary English and American philosophers and dutifully quotes Hare, Davidson, Mackie, Dennett, Ayer and so forth, as well as other, more traditional figures, in order to provide a context for the scientific information. But his comments on what he quotes, and his ...”

“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...”

“... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines. What constitutes the life ...”

“... Ukrainian conflict. ‘I am spelling Kiev and Odessa in the way they have always been spelled in English and don’t feel the need to take what many regard as a political stance by switching to the Ukrainian Kyiv and Odesa,’ Judah reports with some exasperation, in an afterword to his book. Indeed, his assertion that history ‘weighs very heavily on ...”

“... family life that now brings the shout, ‘Oh, just like the 1950s!’ from visitors to such English seaside resorts as Southwold and Frinton. A few years later, however, we could look into the rear-view mirror and see the 1960s, the Swinging Sixties, unquestionably the most famous ten-year stretch of world history. Yet the 1960s didn’t happen ...”

“... problem. So too, for many, is the God-human thing. That question hasn’t quite gone away – as Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists would like it to – but you don’t get published in philosophy or neurophysiology journals by invoking our unique relationship to a Creator God as a way of accounting for our mental and vital properties. The human-machine ...”

“... It yields such truths as that before there were human beings there were trees and rocks; that the English phrase ‘the sun’ refers to a certain star; that our theory that we live on a planet in the galactic system is true because we live on such a planet. Such formulae can express our scientific and other knowledge, but they give no general philosophical ...”

“... travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental travel, rather than as a ...”

“... publishing around 1980, I had his book of poems The Visit (1970) on permanent loan from the English Faculty Library at Cambridge. It would fall due and I would renew it. I must have read it quite literally hundreds of times – and everyone else not at all! ‘No one shaved, and only the turtle washed,’ as Lowell said of the turtle in the bathtub. I ...”

“... their Parliamentary critics proved wrong.) By 1642 ritual acts were more controversial than ever. English parishioners had long been used to ministers who rejected traditional ceremonies, but some now endured a clergy which insisted on novelties. When, in 1584, the vicar of Preston Capes refused to perform the ‘churching’ (or thanksgiving ...”

“... dictatorial in business and bohemian in private life, he nevertheless created that cosy temple of English middle and highbrow culture, Penguin Books. Penguin books themselves had their paradoxical aspect. In form, they are what Germans (who have never really gone in for the mass-market paperback) call Wegwer-fliteratur – throwaway books. Yet in the thirty ...”

“... The judge also asked the jurors if any of them were reading any book. Only one said he was – Richard Wright’s Native Son. When it came down to cutting the jurors to eight, the one person who said he was a book reader was discharged. Perhaps this is why some of our writers, given the chance, become performing seals. John Malcolm Brinnin met Capote ...”