“... order and the idea of Rome, must come forward in his place. This severe placing of the two poets held firmly and perhaps still holds. When I was taught Latin and Greek it was made very clear to me that Ovid was a negligible poet: frivolous, trivial, superficial. I imagine that in the intervening centuries a formal objection had gradually taken ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... is dead. There are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”

“... during the Second World War Albanian campaign and describe soldiers, as Wilfred Owen or David Jones might, making their way to ‘the place where you don’t find weekdays or holidays, sick people or healthy people, poor or rich’. To possess a sunny disposition may be as much a handicap to a poet seeking approval in Britain as to come from a sunny ...”

“... and of the same university, and their careers in literary journalism have intertwined. They are held to belong to a coterie which has been termed – embarrassingly for them, doubtless – the New Oxford Wits. Given a degree of literary fraternity, there is no reason why Amis should not have experimented in fiction with Raine’s Martian perspective. The ...”

“... interpreted as the residue left over from a failed Kantianism.’ Now, while it is true that Kant held each of the six propositions about morality in some form or another, he did not hold most of them in the form Fishkin’s subjects exhibit. They are so rigorist as to make even Kant appear lax. Their idea of an exceptionless system of moral rules is ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... January, they have been managed by a new Task Force Europe, led by Johnson’s chief negotiator, David Frost, a burly, acerbic diplomat, one of the few in the Foreign Office who has always loathed the EU. Frost’s conversations with Michel Barnier have become openly bitter and recriminatory, in a way not seen before. Frost is backed up by contemptuous ...”

“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”

“... for this magnum opus, presented his paintings as delays in wax, screens where motifs could be held fast so as to test our responses (or lack of them). His voice is mostly passive, his verbs largely intransitive; Arrive/Depart is a typical title.In a studied phrase Johns spoke of his position as one of ‘shunning statement’. This suggests an aversion to ...”

“... he worked at IISS and Chatham House. The major influence on his work was Michael Howard, who held the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford, translated Clausewitz, and founded both the Department of War Studies and the IISS. Howard supervised Freedman’s PhD thesis and remained his mentor until his death in 2019. Howard was an elegant example of the ...”

“... an 1827 cartoon by Michael Egerton (her selection of London fog illustrators, from Cruikshank to David Langdon, adds entertainment and insight all through the book.)Corton salutes Dickens’s mastery of ‘the use of fog as extended metaphor’. And of course no fog in literature approaches that introduction to Bleak House with ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the ...”

“... clarified me to myself,’ Ammons told him in 1970). Yet when Ammons assented to David Lehman’s interpretation in an interview for the Paris Review (‘I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you had been’), one senses mischief. ‘Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently ...”

“... in its hand. Adie’s story runs in parallel with the account of a half-Iranian American held captive in – where else – an empty white room in Beirut. Lacking digital crayons or toolkit, he fills his blank space with imagination. Why, one wonders, did Powers settle on 1989 as his historical setting? It was, of course, the year he got his ...”