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“... universities, Oxford especially, this was tantamount to an intellectual revolution. Bertrand Russell, whose opposition to the war landed him in jail for six months in 1918 and caused his writings to be put on the War Office Censor’s proscribed list of books, satirised the philosophers as attributing the invasion of Belgium to the substitution of ...”

“... and the Ivy League rolled into one; the University of Phoenix is already the size of all the Russell Group universities put together. The assumption guiding these new institutions is that the internet provides the ideal vehicle for delivering course material to less well-off students, who can study at home as suits their schedule. Automated instruction ...”

“... who dared to croak is Richard Sennett’s first novel and umpteenth book. Like other philosophers (Russell, Wollheim, Scruton, Koestler), he evidently sees fiction as something he ought to chance his arm at, once at least. I’m no judge, but his social-philosophical writing (notably The Fall of Public Man) strikes me as hugely ambitious in its reach, but very ...”

“... But I wish I had pursued more energetically the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward ...”

“... Rayburn was adamantly opposed to the idea after what he’d seen happen to another Texan titan, John Nance Garner, who had traded his power as speaker of the House to become FDR’s running mate in 1932. Eight years later Garner went back to Texas a bitter man, to eke out his days as a pecan farmer; the vice-presidency had broken him. (It was Garner who ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... has eluded them, and its subject is one of the four or five people who stick in my gullet. John Traill Christie was my headmaster for just over four years. I never knew him well, though I have had to think about him a lot. For a brief period I must have occupied his thoughts because he spent about a term and a half, which coincided with some of ...”

“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... the sentence ‘unacceptable’ to speakers of the language. For example, in the sentence ‘John loves Mary,’ ‘loves’ may be replaced by ‘hates’ or ‘eats’, but not by ‘but’, ‘thinks that’ or ‘swims’. Now consider another example, discussed at length by Barthes in his Eléments de Sémiologie, the example of the menu. A man ...”

“... on inducing group hatred, bring to mind the Biblical injunction (one of the few quoted by Bertrand Russell): ‘Follow not a multitude to do evil.’ Germane, and more hopeful, are results indicating that people who take an unpopular stand in public are much less likely to be swayed by conformist statements and actions than are those whose initial ideas are ...”

“... centrality in British culture. Characteristically feeble echoes of this assault were evident in John Major’s recent sneering at ‘progressive theorists’, but some years ago the real emotional dynamic was laid bare, indecently bare, by (as usual) Norman Tebbit, who extolled ‘the man in the pub’ against the upper-class ‘cocktail set’ on the ...”

“... that at every turn the narrative seems to play itself out before our eyes, the first volume of John Richardson’s long-awaited Life of Picasso will leave its readers waiting impatiently for Volume Two. Long may it go on. Meanwhile it is a special kind of pleasure to be able to praise the book of an old and close friend, and be confident that the praise ...”

“... failure of the imagination for an insight into the way reality has to be’. Even I think Bertrand Russell was being a bit cavalier when he said that ‘the universe is just there.’ And when we hit the very funny chapter called ‘A Brief History of Nothing’, we realise that Holt is an expert juggler of the paradoxes that go with so many kinds of ...”

“... It is the media-men and the culturalists who run this very contemporary show: Miles Kington and Russell Davies, Alan Coren and Clive James, Malcolm Bradbury and George Melly. The parodied A’s have it: Douglas Adams (hitchhiking through a galaxy of fading stars), Woody Allen, Kingsley Amis, Anon, John Aubrey, Auden and ...”

“... Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old and affectionate one: they had met in Italy in 1848. William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor of ability ...”