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“... and thus a member of Magdalen senior common room. It was a daunting community, with A.J.P. Taylor, Gilbert Ryle and C.S. Lewis regularly met with on high table. I didn’t have much small talk but what was the point as one seldom got a word in with Taylor and had I had anything to chat to Ryle about it would have been ...”

“... Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s eyes are ‘heavily underpencilled in blue, like the woad dye of ...”

“... anything in the world, the other testifying to the basic structure of everything that exists. As Gilbert Ryle observed many years ago, these ‘subsuming’ disciplines do indeed ‘know everything’, even if it’s properly said that the ‘everything’ they know is everything from a special point of view. Enrico Fermi was an atomic physicist – so ...”

“... both books.The revolution had been launched before the war. A.J. Ayer, encouraged by his teacher Gilbert Ryle, had gone to Austria to learn about the ideas of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists and logicians who were developing the position known as logical positivism. Ayer returned to England and in 1936 published Language, Truth ...”

“... self intact. ‘If you want to know the time ask a policeman’ becomes Ivy Compton-Burnett meets Gilbert Ryle. In philosophy I would find this kind of analysis arid and dispiriting. With Goffman it is different. Funny and perceptive though he is about forms – whether in talk, behaviour or social organisation – forms are never his central concern. In ...”

“... thereof one must speak.’ The reception of the book shaped Gellner’s career in two ways. First, Gilbert Ryle, senior Oxford professor and editor of Mind, the leading trade journal, decided the book was unworthy of review. Bertrand Russell – whom Gollancz, ever the enterprising publisher, had persuaded to write a sympathetic preface – sent a letter ...”

“... How to identify which was which? The secrets that had to be kept close would then be what Gilbert Ryle – coincidentally, writing at exactly this time – called ‘knowing-that’: facts, theories, propositions, even tables, graphs, drawings. Or was the key element procedural or practical knowledge – in ...”

“... is that Pevsner, writing in 1953, says of the nowadays perfectly acceptable rood screen by George Gilbert Scott, ‘It should be replaced,’ and the faux-Cosmati pulpit similarly. Apropos guides we are using Henry Thorold’s Shell Guide to County Durham written in 1980 which recommends a visit to Finchale (pronounced Finkle) Priory set in a bend of a river ...”

“... the idea of tolerance’ and less insistent on the idea that all philosophers ought to write like Gilbert Ryle. It’s not that tolerance is not a virtue, only that all kinds of things which are not virtues can hide in its skirts, and that tolerance itself may be indistinguishable from condescension. Thody’s problem is Barthes’s Frenchness, or rather ...”

“... emerged from the intelligence war with some important and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent and sophisticated of his ...”

“... Murderers are frequently reported by acquaintances to be civil, diligent, pleasant in manner, if a little reserved, normal in appearance, cultivated to a degree, kind to animals and, with certain fatal exceptions, to their fellow human beings. If such characteristics were grounds for suspicion, Dennis Nilsen, who strangled and dismembered 14 or 15 youths in North London over a period of five years, would have been rounded up with the rest of us ...”

“... are in fundamentally different categories. That is the beginning of a lesson well taught by Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind forty years ago. Indeed minds, unlike computers, are not things at all. We use the noun ‘mind’ often enough, but not to pick out a class of entities. It does not even work much like the matching words in the French or ...”