“... he argued, treats experience as a congeries of isolated impressions, of the kind once proposed by David Hume.) The praise was sincere, and generous too: a leader of Parisian opinion was offering a leg-up to a young provincial who might easily become his rival. And Camus needed all the help he could get: his paper had folded ...”

“... Past and Future. And Yale has inaugurated a new series, ‘Why X Matters’, with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters. Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The ...”

“... chairs around the walls and a square, black table in the middle. Two men were waiting. One was young, and appeared to have come to the clinic from a construction site, the other was elderly, bald, wearing a jacket and tie. Charles reached out for any one of the magazines on the low table, a woman’s magazine filled with photographs of kitchens and ...”

“... they could come to an arrangement. Many married white girls, even though they might already have young brides back home in Mirpur. They drank, ate meat that wasn’t halal, and only rarely went to the East London Mosque on Commercial Road, which had been established in 1941. They were living in that tough but liberating prelude to mass immigration from the ...”

“... locked. On the platform, at almost at the same moment, someone he has noticed takes action: the young man in the nondescript camel-coloured duffel coat, completely wrong for the temperature and the time of year, raised himself in a leisurely way from his crouching position over the black case. Somewhere further away there was a cry, then a number of ...”

“... the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the credit to Hume, whom David Trimble also praises in one of the articles in To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: it was thanks to Hume’s redefinition of Irish nationalism, Trimble says, that ‘a common ground, where dialogue might take place’, could be found. In retrospect Hume’s ...”

“... to deal in biography: Duncan-Jones explores the case for William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, as the young man of the Sonnets; Weis points out such details as the greater frequency of medical characters in Shakespeare’s plays after his daughter Susanna’s marriage to Dr John Hall. Can we – should we – tell ourselves not to be interested in such ...”

“... his one attempt at loving someone and caring for something other than his deep mental comfort, the young woman who had hoped to rescue him bitterly says, ‘How kind you are to yourself,’ and tells him to ‘rest easy’. ‘After all,’ she says, ‘that is where your happiness lies.’ Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a ...”

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the social ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour Party de jure and others de facto. It was a measure both of the successes of the Conservative Party in the Eighties and the apparent decay of the social-democratic and Marxist alternatives that such a popular front was ...”

“... wakened by the growl of thunder and lightning.’ Into this ghostly idyll come two men: first, David Caravaggio, a friend of Hana’s father from before the war in Toronto; and later, a young sapper, Kirpal Singh, nicknamed Kip – a Sikh from the Punjab, who has been detailed to clear the area around the villa of ...”

“... As a young man working for Lord Beaver-brook’s broadsheet Daily Express, I used to have a highly pleasurable daydream in which the coincidence of my name being the same as my employer’s led to some confusion among the company lawyers, with the result that I became the proprietor on the Old Man’s death. I would visualise myself getting off the bus outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin ...”

“... nature of the game.’ Following the ‘blackwash’ of England and the serious injuries to two young batsmen, he is moved to reiterate the ‘chilling dimension’ brought to the game by the undeniably brilliant but potentially lethal West Indian fast bowlers, hunting not in the traditional pairs but in packs. There is the danger of going over the top in ...”

“... sometimes like an efficient, pet-loving country gentlewoman, sometimes like a gallant and athletic young man. Then there is a good photograph of Kinanjui, a Kikuyu chieftain with whom she was friendly and whose death she describes and mourns in the sombre final section of her book. This epitaph for Kinanjui precedes a similar lament for Denys Finch-Hatton, her ...”