“... cliché. 30 September. Finish reading The Guest from the Future by György Dalos, an account of Isaiah Berlin’s visit to Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in November 1945 and its disastrous repercussions on Akhmatova’s career, or, at any rate, on her relations with the authorities. Neither the poet nor the philosopher comes out of it particularly ...”

“... for finally accepting: ‘It was a club his friends thought he ought to belong to – as they (Isaiah, Stuart, "K” [Kenneth Clark], Noel, Freddy) did.’ Part of the difficulty of saying anything even halfway critical of Spender is similar to the difficulty of raising even the mildest reservations about the genre of contemporary literary biography: one ...”

“... her a place in public life either. So what did she do? She made a public sphere of her own, in her Berlin garret, where she read books, wrote wonderful letters, made friends with Goethe himself and hosted salons, attended by Schlegel, the Humboldts, Heinrich Heine and occasionally Hegel too. ‘From this coign of vantage, in letters as in life,’ Rose ...”

“... in tandem. Among other connections, a turn towards Jewish themes and problems, from the time of Isaiah to that of Wojtyla, is noticeable. Each of these strands in Ginzburg’s writing is an invitation to thought. The first question that comes to mind is this. Why does epistemology figure so prominently in the work of a historian who has otherwise often ...”