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“... in responding to the challenge. Writing in the last issue of this review, the American philosopher David Hoy gives courteous attention to Hartman’s redemptive strategy. But he remains sceptical about Derrida’s influence and, in the last resort, dismissive of his claims. For him, Derrida practises a ‘recognisable genre’, that of bringing philosophy to ...”

“... a collection of essays that examine the physical and mental injuries inflicted by the civil wars, David Appleby addresses the problem of wandering soldiers. These were disbanded veterans, deserters and escaped prisoners of war, who frequently clashed with civilian communities as they tried to make their way home. Some didn’t have a home: the majority of ...”

“... direct a Mafia film called Donnie Brasco. The producers were Barry Levinson and his partner, Mark Johnson. We had first met when Levinson, Alan Parker and I had dinner in London. It was a wonderfully smug affair: the last three films we had directed, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons, had between them received 23 Oscar nominations. Levinson ...”

“... analysis of the essential virtues – or vices – of his poetry has not really altered since Dr Johnson, whose definition of metaphysical wit as a discordia concors remains central. It just depends on whether you – or your times – like it or need it, or not. Donne was a succès d’estime in the early to mid-17th century, was disliked in the ...”

“... she called it. The English language isn’t keen on the ineffable – in his book on translation David Bellos memorably says that ‘everything is effable’ – but it does recognise mystery when it has to, and it once allowed us, Diski says, ‘a neat phrase’ for ‘the mist in our minds’: ‘I know not what.’ The phrase ‘works fine in ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... control of its destiny. Eventually segregation was undone by the legislative efforts of Lyndon Johnson, the first Southern senator to make it to the White House in a hundred years. LBJ saw that breaking with his former colleagues was the way to cement his national electoral appeal. He did what FDR couldn’t: he undermined the South from within. ‘If ...”

“... the ear with some splendid novelty than awaken those ideas that slumber in the heart’ – Samuel Johnson, who in a page or two of unanswerable analysis clarifies the reasons why a poet whom he both loved and respected could not conceal ‘the difficulty which he found in exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart’. The key word is ...”

“... of literature in our time. Its two predecessors, The Imaginary Library (1982) and Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (first published in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson), which were issued by a different publisher, were less sourly jokey and less apocalyptic. The first in particular ...”

“... with video games might find that plausible, but a very different picture emerges from Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You (2005). According to Johnson, the sophisticated video games of today (unlike the simplistic Pac-Man-style games of yesteryear) involve richly imagined worlds with their own hidden ...”

“... been hastily updated to include new sanctions in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Boris Johnson said the bill would ‘tighten the noose around Putin’s regime’. Anti-corruption experts are more circumspect: the measures are piecemeal and there is little sign of meaningfully increased investment in enforcement. A veteran financial transparency ...”

“... and using any form of written communication at all is rank idiocy. Long before Freud, Samuel Johnson suggested that the impression of artless intimacy given by letters could be a sham. ‘There is indeed no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse … A friendly letter is a calm and ...”

“... foreign minister, Abba Eban, visited Washington, in an attempt to broker a deal with President Johnson and to ascertain what exactly the Americans wanted. In Washington he received a telegram from Tel Aviv, most likely written by Rabin, describing the military situation as nearing catastrophe. Years later, Eban wrote in his memoirs: ‘I found it difficult ...”

“... adjudicated as being mentally unsound’. It was far more anaemic than the bill that Lyndon Johnson had hoped to pass, but it enraged a faction of NRA hardliners, who would succeed in overturning the law prohibiting interstate sales. One board member, Neal Knox, argued that Kennedy’s assassination might have been the work of gun control activists ...”

“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”