“... We need merely to observe that one and the same event can be described in these two ways. We may also, if we like, hold that mental descriptions are supervenient on physical descriptions, so that physical twins must also be mental twins: but this is an optional extra, in no way entailed by the thesis of anomalous monism. There are indeed two very ...”

“... but equally pervasive. Within the high bourgeois household, a new ideal of the nuclear family may have created new intimacies, but it certainly led to a new separateness from poor or demanding relatives. A new passion for sexual information and new strains of art and writing which catered to it seem to have tried the patience of moralists and the solidity ...”

“... of the battle between Private Eye and the financier Jimmy Goldsmith from January 1976 to May 1977. The Eye had been investigating possible links between Wilson and the KGB, using material leaked to them by MI5 – the first evidence of that MI5 subversion of the Wilson Government dealt with by famous Peter Wright. Lady Falkender and Wilson had urged ...”

“... of race, which now seems so disreputable, just as it is pleasing to find that Benoist’s painting may have a relationship with the enlightened legislation of the French Revolution. But what matters more is that Cordier and Benoist, and, indeed, Reynolds, shared a view of African blacks as being in some sense closer to nature than European whites: not ...”

“... and ‘Les Beaux Draps’. There was a moment, after the war, when the virtues of Destouches may have saved Céline from suffering further for his trespasses: in 1951, when the charges of wartime collaboration against him were re-heard, the examining judge is said not to have realised, or to have been told, that the good doctor, against whom there was no ...”

“... films, radio and television. Arabs in Morocco, on the one hand, Iraq, on the other, who may have very little in common, are likely to have had a lifetime of watching Egyptian films (or television serials) to connect them. Similarly, modern Arabic literature has spread out from Cairo since the beginning of the century; for years Mahfouz was a ...”

“... leadership was moving away from it. Intense international pressure induced Shamir to come up, in May 1989, with a Palestinian election plan but it was a plan that he knew would be unacceptable to the Palestinians. His aim in framing it was simply to shift the responsibility for the continuing deadlock onto the Palestinians. In any case, this plan was added ...”

“... too – by exploiting the advantage of its being in the ivy league without the ivy. The LSE may not fulfil the intentions of its initial Fabian benefactor, but there is still a real sense in which it is the institution Sidney Webb created. His thinking obviously was that socialism on the Fabian model held the future in its bones. As disinterested ...”

“... judged right to include the ribald verses ... The editor is aware that such scabrous exuberances may lend themselves to either the wrong kind or the wrong amount of attention.’ But Ricks makes the case for including them, of which the most important points are ‘that the ribald verses constitute part of the story of the poet’s transition from the ...”

“... it remains a wonderful book, and a prime concern to lovers of Ford; Saunders does it justice. It may seem useless to complain that doing so much justice makes this biography too long. Saunders looks into every corner and does a lot of literary criticism along the way; one feels, as his prose rolls equably on and the notes pile up, that this is a celebration ...”

“... rumours too: for example, that there will be a definitive partition, in which case Gorazde may be abandoned as part of some deal with RS, and a neat redrawing of boundaries. Or they wonder if Gorazde will be the launching point for a new offensive. I feel as isolated from the political mainstream as the rest of the population and no longer in any ...”

“... by conjunctions. The ‘lists’ are arranged with the most delicate prosodic care, as anyone may discover who will beat time through the sentence quoted above, counting syllables, noting the incidence of stresses, observing above all the rhythms of expansion and contraction in phrase length. There is an elegant command of the metres of prose; and swathed ...”

“... keeps me from better things’) when he killed the sleuth at the Reichenbach Falls on 4 May 1891. But reader demand obliged him to resurrect Holmes in 1893, and again in 1903 and 1921. It wasn’t that the author wanted to do it, just that the dollars offered by his American publisher were more than he could refuse. Rider Haggard killed his most ...”

“... to line up exactly. A philosopher of this second kind – call him a ‘linguistic idealist’ – may either regard the ontologies of different discourses as incommensurable (the line of thinking of a Kuhn or a Saussure or a Derrida) or, like Quine, regard the attribution of an ontology to a discourse as a useful but sloppy bit of projection. An excellent new ...”

“... in many ways so essentially the same as they were so long ago that I must make an admission which may be a confession: Experience has taught me nothing.’ The publication of these curiosities now can only re-affirm the drift of this self-analysis, and deepen our awareness of the extraordinary misunderstandings that accompanied Schwartz’s enormous original ...”