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“... for Hume both as a philosopher and as a man. The obituary notice, in the form of a letter to William Strahan, which Smith allowed to be published, along with Hume’s few pages of autobiography ‘My Own Life’, in 1777, concluded with the words: ‘Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching ...”

“... hap hazardly, often without any discernible strategic purpose. Cabbage fields in the middle of broad valleys are surrounded by bunkers. Tiny hamlets on deserted mountainsides are defended by scores of solid concrete bunkers, while the people, unable to find cement and bricks, are trying to build shacks with quarry stones and mud. In Petrash, the villagers ...”

“... hands and delicate features; Paolozzi is a little older, squat and square, with a pug nose, full broad mouth and strong pudgy hands. Together – the film’s title – they make a droll Beckettian pair (Waiting for Godot was in 1956 on everyone’s mind), but Mazzetti adds a twist: her heroes are deaf-mutes. We watch them communicating by signing and facial ...”

“... for George Sand and her close friendship with the outspoken Anna Jameson, was an exceptionally broad-minded observer. In her eagerness to show the respectability of female marriages, Marcus perhaps doesn’t make enough of the tone of that liberal milieu, in which the unshockable ‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon’ would have been the norm. Henry ...”

“... like to call a ‘roller-coaster’ career, though it has more noticeably gone up than down. The broad outline of his story is well-known. The young Archer shines in athletics at Oxford, gets into the papers as an ebullient fund-raiser for charities (though questions are raised about his percentage of the take), and then enters Tory politics as the late ...”

“... and ruled capital punishment itself to be ‘cruel and unusual’. In Furman’s case only William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s one black member, voted to strike down nearly all existing capital statutes on the grounds that they were intrinsically in violation of human rights or communal dignity. As Marshall put it in another ...”

“... parasitic organism which causes one of the world’s great killer diseases: ‘Mosquito Day’. Or William Castle (1897-1990), a young resident at Boston City Hospital who knew from earlier work that pernicious anaemia involved the production of too few red blood cells, that vast quantities of raw or slightly cooked liver resolved the problem, and that ...”

“... source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the ...”

“... had brought out crucial differences between the two men which each had refused to see: as William Haller said long ago in his astute and still highly readable Early Life of Robert Southey (1917), the scheme was thrilling to Coleridge as a philosophical experiment, while appealing to Southey chiefly as a set of rules. Coleridge, ever eager to find in ...”

“... judicial legacy. The retirement of Chief Justice Burger created the opportunity: Reagan promoted William Rehnquist to the chief justiceship, selecting Antonin Scalia as his replacement on the bench. Senate Democrats reacted sharply, but aimed their fire at the wrong target: in trying, and failing, to deprive Rehnquist of his (symbolic) promotion, they gave ...”

“... has its representatives in the volumes under review. Mind and Cognition, in particular, offers a broad sample of philosophical opinion on these matters, though it seems biased towards the more ‘hardnosed’ end of the spectrum. What should become clear to theorists of cognition once the issue of meaning is explicitly raised is that the computer model of ...”

“... scattered stars fall like the ruined typesetting of a printer into one tangled mass’. Professor William Thomson had explained it all. God, however, was eternal, and through Him we would – or could – partake in His immortality. The nibs of our pens might rust the ink might fade, and the paper might perish. More seriously, perhaps, what we had written ...”

“... truth which lies in tranquillity: society is ruin.’ But he offers one further clue, a hint so broad that it defies one to take it seriously: that de Maistre is a priest of Naphta. If we take him at his word, everything falls into place, and the story of Kasch becomes a straightforward parable about the transition from the Ancien Régime to ...”

“... which for four years was methodically (and, from the South Coast, audibly) reduced to mush. Sir William Orpen, visiting the Somme battlefield six months after the slaughter, reported vividly and unexpectedly: no words could express the beauty of it. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure – dazzling white. While daisies, red poppies and a blue ...”

“... on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”