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“... to the layman and in advancing towards solutions. It would be interesting to know how Hume or Russell would have reacted to some of his more provocative conclusions. Hume’s philosophy was very anthropocentric, but it is unlikely that he would have agreed with such a dramatic extension of the mind’s ‘propensity to spread itself on things’. ...”

“... And then, of course, there were the young directors whom Wheldon fostered: John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, David Jones, Peter Newington, Humphrey Burton. They were encouraged, chivvied, and in Russell’s case restrained from some of his wilder excesses, all in the cause of demonstrating ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... as soon as the bullet is removed he is riding the trail again with the rest of the boys. Until Russell Crowe kills him, that is. ‘I always liked you, Byron,’ Crowe says to his old enemy, ‘but you always did talk too much.’ Everyone in westerns talks too much, while carefully cultivating a myth of taciturnity. A matter of diction and ...”

“... for the secular and liberal causes of their day. John Stuart Mill was one such, and Bertrand Russell another. In our own time, the latest and perhaps the last of this chain of great figures has been Sir Alfred Ayer. Ayer shares with Russell and with Mill not only an intellectual allegiance to empiricist doctrine, and a ...”

“... which includes excellent semi-technical short books on, among others, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Russell, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. The author, who lectures in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oxford, writes from first-hand expert knowledge of experimental work in animal behaviour and the relevance of experiments on animals to human ...”

“... we are only directly aware of our own visual sense-data, and similarly with the other four senses. Russell takes Berkeley in this way and criticises him for confusing the act of perception with its object. But this is not an accurate interpretation of Berkeley’s position, because it credits him with a view of perception which may be ours but certainly is not ...”

“... from less privileged backgrounds who may be lacking the “polish” of their upper-middle-class, Russell Group-educated contemporaries’. The justification for this, as old as snobbery itself, is that the brown-shoe wearer would simply not ‘fit in’. Snobbery works like Chinese boxes. The teenager who gets good enough A-levels aims for the desirable ...”

“... The publisher’s launching party for David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy in the Moses Room of the House of Lords on 22 October was the third occasion on which I had been inside that curious place since taking my seat as a hereditary member of it. The Moses Room is evidently so called because its walls depict, in tableaux more impressive for their size than their quality, the appropriate Old Testament scenes ...”

“... The school’s motto continues to be ‘giving children back their childhood’. Bertrand Russell, like Neill, preached the benefits of an unconstrained childhood. Neill said that Russell’s On Education (1926) was the only book on the topic he’d read without uttering an expletive, while ...”

“... Both David Cressy and Cynthia Herrup believe they are writing microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the detailed stories of individual trials ...”

“... It was only slightly softened by his employment as a fabric buyer for the furniture-maker Gordon Russell, whose firm was valiantly trying to blow the cobwebs out of the English home, through its ersatz latticed windows. With immense effort, Pevsner had mastered an increasingly idiomatic English by 1936, turned his early work for the department of commerce at ...”

“... said that, for all our uncertainty, we have a pretty good fix on the basic nature of the physical. David Lewis once claimed that ‘the physical nature of ordinary matter under mild conditions is very well understood.’ But this isn’t true. It isn’t true even when we put aside the point that the known phenomena of experience are wholly a matter of the ...”

“... in public, so there is no reason why they should hold back in reference books. Writing on Lord Russell of Killowen, Lord Templeman says this firm believer in certainty and precedent ‘did not approve of the purposive construction of statutes and did not admire the intellectual flexibility which enabled Lord Denning to his own satisfaction to temper the ...”

“... the theatre of a state opening of Parliament, featuring such kenspeckle figures as ‘Sir David Frost arriving to exchange a word with his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal’, and the Earl Marshal pointing out the patriotic wall paintings to his French guests and saying: ‘Vous voyez? Agincourt. Autre victoire pour nous. Victoire ...”