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“... While Richard Wollheim doesn’t go so far as to suggest that the unexamined emotion is not worth feeling, he does proceed on the assumption that it is beneficial for philosophers and non-philosophers alike to have an accurate picture of a powerful and ever-present part of the human constitution. And in a variety of ways he chides philosophers for their inattention to what he takes to be certain facts of the matter about our psyches ...”

“... and epidemiology – by persuading the local Board of Guardians to remove the handle from the Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) pump. He believed water drawn from it was the source of a cluster of cholera deaths. Cases fell – evidence that the infectious agent was water-borne. The cholera has gone but Soho still has room for marginal lives and ...”

“... For the record, it should be pointed out that Freddie left behind in London University a uniquely broad syllabus. In the Sunday Telegraph (2 July) Professor Roger Scruton published an article headed ‘The man who hated wisdom’. Scruton is a professional philosopher. He knows the history of philosophy well. He is fully aware of the complex issues that ...”

“... well, I might as well pick up this old thing too.’ I hoped the volume was going to be Richard Bentley’s 1711 edition of Horace, which is full of his sometimes inspired and sometimes not so inspired conjectural emendations. When I got it home I found it was an English translation of Bentley’s notes on Horace’s Odes, along with ‘Notes upon ...”

“... Each generation fashions its own image of Richard II. To his contemporaries, Richard’s fate was an admonitory instance of changing fortune: the King fell in the midst of his glory and was delivered into the hands of his enemies. To historians of the Tudor age, Richard’s deposition by one of his subjects was a terrible warning of the dangers of rebellion, bequeathing to succeeding generations a legacy of bloodshed and civil strife ...”

“... lost. One late afternoon we would enter a pretty Norman village, with its apple trees and broad barns, and two days later we re-entered it from the other end, and it was another place. The timber frames were still smouldering, and there were piles of old women’s clothes in the lanes, and the dead cattle were lying on their sides with vast distended ...”

“... snobbery and élitism, half-revel in the righteous disdain these provoke. All this is a matter of broad cultural psychology, and complaining about it is like carping at the current placings in the pop charts – harmless, but pretty futile. The thing to acknowledge is that these are the leading factors drawing an audience to look at ‘the art of ...”

“... of what Hugh Ormsby-Lennon refers to in the book as ‘a social solidarity semantic’. The broad concentration upon a generally-neglected period of language history (the 17th and 18th centuries) is wholly welcome, as is the attention paid to lexicology and semantics. But even at their best, the authors sadly make us doubt their scholarly ...”

“... avant-garde – Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as ...”

“... simply one of many ways to acquire knowledge. Publishers and editors seem to believe that the broad public underwent a mutation after 1989 when they started to hate molecular genetics, taking up instead with psychedelic phenomena and the works of St Augustine. It is, in many ways, an interesting situation; the new political freedom in Central Europe looks ...”

“... or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of writing’, also believes, according to Norris, that ‘literary critics had best give up the idea that philosophy (or “theory”) is capable of solving any problems created by their own ...”

“... buildings with a hilltop school. M was captain of the hilltop school. He was very tall, very broad, with a shock of curly bronzed hair and a permanent dark stubble. He leaned backwards as he walked. He carried a long cane under his arm, and he exuded a savage caddishness. I was amazed that Christie should have summoned me to discuss M. ‘Now ...”

“... they were, and from the gallery of the House of Commons one could observe a multitude of well-fed, broad-bottomed types on the Liberal benches. But seen through the eyes of a true Tory, bred to the Church and the Land, these gentlemen appeared to be a pretty suspect crowd. Welshmen, Scots, Dissenters, tradesmen – there was something wrong with all of ...”

“... parallel when Clinton was told that the architect of his ‘family values’ election campaign, Richard Morris, was about to be exposed in the press as the assiduous client of a call-girl, with whom he had shared White House secrets. It was the worst possible kind of scandal for Clinton, given the past stories of his own extra-marital affairs, now more ...”

“... past – which is only seven decades old – and the Soviet present in separate analytical boxes. Richard Pipes resisted the pressure to choose between historical and political specialisms. He matched his articles on Khrushchev and Brezhnev with works on the origins of Russian Marxism. His first book, on the foundation of the Soviet Union as a ...”