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“... According to the ‘analytic’ tradition, modern philosophy begins with Descartes (b. 1596), Spinoza (b. 1632), Locke (b. 1632), Leibniz (b. 1646), Berkeley (b. 1685), Hume (b. 1711) and Kant (b. 1724). This is the canonical list of great philosophers, and it is not very likely to change. But there are two others whose claims for inclusion are regularly pressed: Nicholas Malebranche (b ...”

“... I mean the first part of his book) is ‘On Masculinity and Related Questions’. A piece on Peter Murphy’s new book, Studs, Tools and the Family Jewels: Metaphors Men Live By (Wisconsin, $19.95) would have fitted in there nicely, bearing as it does on the cliché question, too. Amis is, alas, unlikely ever to write about it, but if he did, perhaps the ...”

“... nothing to do with the A6 murder, but that they had been on intimate terms with the real killer: Peter Alphon. I was hooked on the case that gloomy February afternoon and, nearly 32 years later, I still am. Bob Woffinden’s new book* has revived the intoxicating mixture of anguish and curiosity with which Jean Justice inspired me all those years ago. Since ...”

“... She has ‘great media contacts’: her mother is the novelist Sally Emerson; her father is Sir Peter Stothard, the freshly knighted editor of the TLS and former editor of the Times. So who cares about the text? The whole circus could be seen as a pale attempt to follow the transatlantic precedent set by Nick McDonell, the teenage author of Twelve ...”

“... one demands cause, the other demands purpose; both recoil from the random and the accidental. Peter Carey has deservedly won the Booker Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang. The WHSmith Book Award, continuing its flight from elitism, has renamed itself ‘The People’s Choice’. To have a go at being the people’s Kenneth Baker, all you need to do ...”

“... hawked in vain round the University Presses of North America: it was left to Michael Schmidt and Peter Jones of the relatively unfunded Carcanet Press to recognise the moral and cultural responsibility. In fact, I find my sympathy goes out to Drummond very easily indeed. I must declare an interest, for I was associated with Virginia de Araujo when she ...”

“... Sir Peter Hall is a man of Notes. He is a director of plays who has become Director of the National Theatre. The skills of play directors are not those of performers (like his predecessor at the National, Lord Olivier). Play directors pride themselves on their ability to give what they call Notes. This sort of Note (scarcely recognised by dictionaries) is not the sort manual workers make, in notebooks or on notepaper: it is mouth work ...”

“... and cultural and has been the focus of most subsequent scholarship – of which Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s King and Court in Ancient Persia 559 to 331 BCE is an admirable example. By one of those incomprehensible quirks of academic fashion, some thirty years ago, Llewellyn-Jones reminds us, ‘courts were seen as moribund ...”

“... much to shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good ...”

“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be. He was brought up in Sheffield, Falkirk and Stockport and speaks in a sharp Mancunian accent, but he is also an Oxford graduate, with all the connections that can entail ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... dinners’ were being held, at first under the auspices of Butler’s great friend Henry Festing Jones (the last dinner was in July 1914), and Forster was offered £25 by his publisher as an advance for a book about Butler. Lytton Strachey, who also found Butler immensely ‘cheering’, wanted to write on him in the Edinburgh Review; and Forster, who ...”

“... last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is ...”

“... set fire to the RAF bombing school – or training camp, depending on your point of view, though Peter Ho Davies tacitly takes the nationalist line – at Penrhos. Arthur drinks on the other side of the pub from the English soldiers, in the Welsh-speaking public bar. His daughter doesn’t share his politics: she’s ‘proud of her Welshness’ but ...”

“... talents hampering himself with an over-studious respect for the traditional forms. Brian Jones’s The Island Normal suffers from no such fault. Most of the poems in this book contrive to be both short and unshapely. Jones casts a disaffected eye over the bleaker aspects of our national landscape – dreary ...”