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“... is it? These are the sorts of question that obsessed Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey in the early 20th century. Russell became a public figure of the kind that Kitcher approves; Wittgenstein is read by non-philosophers; and Ramsey was a pragmatist. Yet Kitcher implies that they were wrong to pursue such questions, which have no ...”

“... physical response. In a recent essay on Francis Bacon in the New York Review of Books, John Richardson recalls that Bacon aimed his images of his friend George Dyer ‘at the nervous system’, and adds that a ‘woman admirer’ told him they did indeed induce ‘a visceral shudder’. That the shudder should be described as a violent physical response ...”

“... the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice ...”

“... account of Boswell’s later life which was published six years ago by one of the present editors, Frank Brady – is the worse for its author’s frustrations, prostrations and despairs, interesting though he can sometimes make them appear; it conveys what can often seem like a bitter end for the likely lad from Ayrshire; Boswell’s last legs are apt to give ...”

“... He liked to hear and to tell a good story about other writers, and was delighted when his friend Frank Swinnerton ventured to call on John Galsworthy in the country, and reported that the great man had risen from his work-table exclaiming gravely: ‘I say, Swinnerton, this is very sporting of you, very sporting indeed.’ Oddly enough, Walpole has probably ...”

“... of a cloud-torn vista, while Legs I and II, rear views of a bending woman, are as ‘anatomically frank and strikingly erotic’ as anything the male Surrealists ever produced. In another photomontage, Forbidden Games of 1935, a preposterous satire on bourgeois respectability, a mixed-gender monster sits astride a patient male partner, as a little boy looks ...”

“... any scandal, allowing the writer to puff and genuflect and conceal his way to glory. Take Frank Kermode’s Not Entitled, a memoir typical of a generation of men who thought things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his diary, he ...”

“... forbidden friend. Whereas Sophie von La Roche’s novel is one long rout of balls, formal games, frank exchanges of opinion, serious and less serious viewings of the heroine of the middle rank by the members of the aristocracy into which she fervently hopes to marry. Some of the difference of climate is also a difference of period: La Roche’s acknowledged ...”

“... should be writing a thesis on the idea of seduction as extended metaphor in the works of Samuel Richardson), and his evocations of landscape and seascape are successful, not simply as description, but as definitions of a mythic environment. There is much to praise, and yet there remains one fairly considerable reservation: the book belies the promise of its ...”

“... made new work for description. Austen’s filthy cups and saucers, like Defoe’s shoes and Richardson’s rusty tacks, are objects laid low by accident or neglect. A commodity is an object raised in and through its preparedness for exchange – its abstraction from the sensuous human activity of which it is the product – to the status of an ...”

“... all the while the blood is building up,’ Milza said. In March 2009, the actress Natasha Richardson died of a seemingly mild head injury after a fall in Canada while skiing. Although she appeared unhurt at first, she developed a haematoma; there was a delay and she was dead on arrival at the hospital. ‘If the bone in your skull was broken at the ...”

“... friend. Before returning to America in 1915, he wrote home with some news: ‘To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently.’ In their sharp-witted introduction, the editors of the Letters excuse this by claiming that ‘bragging isn’t really “bragging” when it’s so manifestly a ...”

“... the Welfare State. ‘When Democracy builds’ was the title of an ardent and prophetic lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ned’s near-contemporary. But, for Lutyens, democratic government could ‘only work through compromise, leaving its conscience in the hands of accountants’. Hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas and underground railway stations had no ...”

“... always a war with real life. Storey describes a rehearsal with John Gielgud (as Harry) and Ralph Richardson (as Jack) of Home, his play about England and everyday madness. The actors are navigating their way around two chairs and a table. Storey starts by showing the two actors before segueing into what’s happening offstage. Reading the memoir it’s ...”

“... and instantly recognisable, figure of ‘Homer Simpsoane’, who (obviously having read Darley’s frank biography) has no trouble at all in identifying this obsessive and sadistic father as ‘the first Dysfunctionalist’. The 20th-century enthusiasm for Soane’s work might seem to be just another strand in the traditional tale of architectural revaluation ...”