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“... time of his own, scorned by the opinion-makers, and written off by the pollsters, Truman defeated Dewey (and Wallace) in 1948 by talking to crowds from the back of a train on a whistle-stop tour across the country, and by holding together the old coalition of labour, the South and the big-city machines. There are some amusing vignettes which reveal the ...”

“... of Naturalism is working itself out in Mind and World. There’s the reductionist version – John McDowell calls it ‘bald’ Naturalism; ‘Scientism’ is another pejorative currently in fashion. And there’s the kind of naturalistic pluralism that McDowell himself is striving for. Very roughly the distinction is between the tradition that runs from ...”

“... twist. Rorty adopted three mascots for his campaign against mentalism and professional philosophy: Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein – one lapsed American Hegelian, one lapsed German phenomenologist, and one lapsed Austrian-Jewish logician. They would have agreed on almost nothing apart from the crassness of Descartes and the inanity of Carnap, but with ...”

“... of fun, but occasionally people one knew or knows are somewhat peremptorily caricatured. Meredith Dewey, for instance, a clergyman not well known to fame, makes a fairly prolonged and risible appearance as a risible clergyman reclining in a room full of risible stones: but Dewey, though perhaps he might have struck an ...”

“... as little in common as may be: Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, or Chomsky, or Piaget, or Saussure, or Dewey or any cognitive scientist you like, to say nothing of such contemporary philosophers as Davidson, Dennett, Rorty and Quine. You may choose practically at random, but they are all likely to agree on this: concepts are capacities; in particular, concepts are ...”

“... permits few books that cannot easily be accommodated within even the inelastic dictates of Dewey classification. There are, in short, six main types of Second World War books. Four hardy perennials are the campaign/battle book; the general’s biography or autobiography; the ordinary soldier/sailor/airman’s memoir; the unit/formation history. A ...”

“... integration of the US Army, causing Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat walkout. In the end Truman beat Dewey by 303 electoral college votes to 189, with the election turning on the results in Ohio, Illinois and California (78 votes between them), all of which Truman won by less than 1 per cent. All three states had large black electorates and the black vote had ...”

“... programme. I have read every Democratic and Republican acceptance speech from those of Truman and Dewey in 1948 to those of Carter and Reagan in 1980, as well as those of some of their illustrious predecessors. What strikes me is the extent to which they represent a canon – albeit a rather fossilised canon – in the literature of American political ...”

“... this time in a more objectively historical context. Hamilton offers 22 case studies, from John Donne – the first properly biographed English author – to Philip Larkin of last month’s Observer fame. Hamilton could not, if he tried, write an unreadable book. Keepers of the Flame is that rarest of modern things, lit crit with laughs. Hamilton has ...”

“... That John Updike has a Trollopian fidelity to his characters is evident from the four books of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure ...”

“... She began her address – ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’ – by saying: ‘According to John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, it is “repugnant to nature”, as well as “contumely to God, and the subversion of good order”, to promote a woman to any position of superiority in any realm. We in the ...”

“... that of Lillian Ross, who in 1952 wrote Picture, an arresting, intimate account of the making of John Huston’s movie of The Red Badge of Courage.* But Joseph Mitchell was doing a similar thing; John Hersey used something of the method in writing Hiroshima, as did James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Since we’re ...”

“... certainty as we can from its surroundings. A figure like the 19th-century English literary fraud John Payne Collier could probably never have flourished in France: if such a person has existed there, then the memory has not survived. No one will ever write his biography, or write about him a book resembling the one that ...”

“... Continental Drift, Bob Dubois dies of stab wounds on a Miami side street. That novel won the 1985 John Dos Passos Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer. The road not taken isn’t pretty, but there’s a lot of mileage in it. ‘This is not Bambi territory,’ a lawyer says in The Sweet Hereafter, the story of a small town convulsed when a school bus ...”

“... argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide between them, owes almost everything to John Rawls. Barry, certainly, has no doubt: Rawls is simply ‘the greatest political philosopher of the century’. But Rawls’s qualities, as Barry describes them, his sense of the range of considerations, his subtlety, his sheer fertility, together with his ...”