“... I have embraced Islam’. Rushdie’s religious change of heart is, of course, a matter for his own conscience. As a public act, however, it is clearly meant to invite a response. Together with his decision not to permit further translations or a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses, it must surely help to resolve the painful impasse in ...”

“... should be so heedless of grammar, syntax and spelling as to be virtually illiterate, it did not matter for practical purposes: her editor at Gollancz could and did put that right, and the public knew nothing about it. There are other deficiencies, however, that cannot be ignored. The dialogue can be laughably banal, and the style undistinguished at best and ...”

“... Davison has decided that the present manuscript pages and some of the typewritten and interlinear matter were written during the period of revision, May to November 1948. The remaining pages are harder to date, but Davison’s Introduction gives all the available evidence. The facsimile has three substantial passages which didn’t survive into the final ...”

“... to the pioneering researches of a handful of historians – above all, M. Dorothy George and Herbert Atherton – the basic documentation of the rise of the political print is fairly secure.† The history is, however, full of ambiguity. On the one hand, graphic satire figured ever larger in the arsenal of the fourth estate. In peak years of political ...”

“... but why should Cawdrey’s ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons’, or for that matter Winchester’s ‘society dandies’, have needed to look up everyday words they already knew? To be sure, during the 17th century the peculiar jargon of trades and arts would be added to the inkhorn terms (of which English had in any case been charier ...”

“... beyond the bounds of political thought proper. Under the influence of his postgraduate supervisor, Herbert Butterfield, Pocock’s first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), drove a bypass round Locke. It concentrated instead on a set of debates among such obscure antiquaries as William Petyt, James Tyrrell, William Atwood and Robert ...”

“... disagreed among themselves. No odium more odious than odium theologicum. Can this possibly matter? MacCulloch admits that the Reformation may now seem like the story of two bald men fighting over a comb. But it mattered in Bremen. In the first phase of the Protestant Reformation, this great north German port, and its cathedral, fell into the hands of ...”

“... Rafael Viñoly, a veteran of big buildings who works out of downtown Manhattan, held even. On the matter of New York birthright, Peter Eisenman pulled out all the stops: of the entrants, Eisenman declared, he alone was present as a child at the visionary origin of modern New York, the 1939 World Fair, where the spectacular tower of the Trylon and the vast ...”

“... explicit in his real poetry. It escapes, in fact, from its always apparently so intrusive subject-matter. How this happens is itself a comment on the way a lot of poetry works, and the kind of world it creates and at times departs from. Burgess’s parody shows what Betjeman is not like, because he singles points and ideas out for treatment in the same way ...”

“... himself one of the masters of his generation and a figure of controversy. His style, his subject-matter, his adroit manipulation of his career roused the fervour of some, the contempt of others ... Attacked in the era of abstractionism for being figurative, he was also denounced for being morbid, macabre and self-indulgent. He responded with wit, made a ...”

“... the University of Iowa in the 1930s, where he began a long and fruitful working relationship with Herbert Feigl, an emigrant from Vienna and a member of the original Vienna circle of logical positivists. Sellars later wrote that ‘Feigl and I shared a common purpose: to formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic realism which would “save the ...”

“... any more than it is a liberal’s job to distinguish his own arguments from those of Herbert Spencer, say, or Ayn Rand. It would be different if Maistre and Schmitt represented major landmarks or points of reference for anti-liberal thought. Holmes’s six anti-liberals were selected because, among other reasons, they were ‘prominent in ...”

“... how big can a little magazine get before it outgrows its weight class? And how, for that matter, is size to be measured? By circulation? Price? Frequency? Rates of payment to contributors? Some average measurement of all of the above? ‘The origins of the small review are lost in obscurity,’ Ezra Pound wrote in his 1930 essay ‘Small ...”

“... on piecework. Henry had died in Cardiff some time before the birth of Rose’s fifth child, Herbert, in 1896; Stella died of tuberculosis in Bedminster in 1903 aged thirteen.Bristol ‘appeared to wear history on its surfaces’. The Home and Colonial Tea Stores opened a branch in Bedminster in 1903; Guinea Street by the Avon was a reference to the ...”

“... and theoretical issues. One would hesitate before saying that the work of Marx, Schumpeter or Herbert Simon was ‘nothing’, and the ‘sophisticated practitioners’ referred to above would certainly not make any such judgment. Yet they would tend to say that their writing, though not lacking in insights, is amorphous, their ideas unformalised and ...”