“... to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit of that with Auden. Look at it from the friends’ point of view. They have to budge up to make room for the new companion, knowing as they do so that they will be seeing less of the great man. Pretty college boy introduced to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Being’. ‘I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known,’ as God says to the prophet David according to the Islamic hadith. Stitched in with these themes is a difficult doctrine of the nature of presence that is bound up with Johnston’s striking views on the nature of perception. One thing that may weigh with Johnston, when he rejects Spinozan ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... said that, for all our uncertainty, we have a pretty good fix on the basic nature of the physical. David Lewis once claimed that ‘the physical nature of ordinary matter under mild conditions is very well understood.’ But this isn’t true. It isn’t true even when we put aside the point that the known phenomena of experience are wholly a matter of the ...”

“... younger, who in the mid-1960s in London brought Cunningham to dinner with the photographer David Montgomery, and Montgomery who gave him the first camera he started using seriously. (Cunningham is a key figure in the new documentary on Lopez, Ramos and their crowd, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco; it was his last interview, and the film is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or ...”

“... rather to my surprise) and a German of remarkable handsomeness and Royal physique. I merely held the gloves, as it were, but it was quite interesting en plein air.’ Then it’s on to Spoleto: ‘This place is mad – Festival of Fifty Queens, it ought to be called. Marvellous characters and camp little restaurants and art shops. Americans, gorgeous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”

“... teachers released. In January 1997, the ex-felons were invited to a ‘Day of Contrition’ – held, appropriately, in Salem.Crime Stoppers, another product of the 1970s, offered a new avenue of anonymous denunciation for citizens who were too squeamish or too prudent to report directly to the police. Crime Stoppers is now an organisation with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... down. It whispers to us in the watches of the night. Our ancestors, faithful to God and Mary, once held this whole island before the foreign heretic took it from us.’ And they will have it back again come what may. The long-awaited Framework Document for a new Northern Ireland states that die Republic intends renouncing its constitutional claim on the whole ...”

“... 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 ...”