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“... Why are some people creative to the point of genius, even though they may not appear especially intelligent, or in any other way remarkable? Creativity is a long-standing puzzle which has received many trite and no very convincing accounts. Explanations range from the Divine Spark to slogging hard work; from unconscious problem-solving to super-conscious awareness; from the darkness of profound dreams to the brightness of extreme wakefulness; from slow gestations to instant insights ...”

“... bond’ as the heart of liberalism, and deplores the possibility of ‘unleashing forces that may rapidly destroy all hope of reestablishing civil dialogue’. Indeed, there is in some of his remarks an almost Habermasian sense that the agreement actually arrived at in the context of an unconstrained dialogue or communication between social agents would ...”

“... milieu of the hacks whom Pope had skewered with malicious wit in the Dunciad. Their archetype was Richard Savage, whose profligate life Dr Johnson – himself an industrious, ill-paid hack in his earlier years in London – had narrated in 1744. The Grub Street the Victorians knew was the far-off one described by Smollett in his novels and, in their own ...”

“... Of all​ the novels responding to the Trump presidency, Richard Powers’s Bewilderment may come closest to pure propaganda. Set in a slightly worse and slightly more technologically advanced version of the present – popular adjustments in recent fiction – Bewilderment takes aim at the administration’s xenophobia and persecution of foreigners, its anti-science and anti-environmental policies, and its attempts to undermine democracy ...”

“... Golden Lane where the cows were kept in the back of the premises, under roof. (Fresh the product may have been, but not necessarily pure. Jackson mentions the water pumps that were kept in cow yards to dilute the milk.) Scharf was particularly engrossed by the grand-scale demolition and building projects which, once the nation had recovered its prosperity ...”

“... long-awaited Life of Picasso will leave its readers waiting impatiently for Volume Two. Long may it go on. Meanwhile it is a special kind of pleasure to be able to praise the book of an old and close friend, and be confident that the praise has nothing to do with the friendship. Volume One has an extraordinary story to tell. We might have expected to ...”

“... Even older fossils have been recovered, including bones of exotic relatives of the giraffe which may date from twenty million years ago. Then there are giant hyenas, as well as bears, hippos and rhinoceroses. Greece and its islands in fact lay at a kind of crossroads for mammal evolution over millions of years, the evidence of which is entombed in the rock ...”

“... were committed to seeing Milosevic and other indictees convicted. But, however understandable it may be to prejudge the guilt of those accused of grave crimes and to wish to see them punished, it does not enhance one’s powers of observation. All court systems that function well do so because they are well supervised: by governments, parliaments and, most ...”

“... but it is true.’ ‘The terror-fantasies of one generation,’ he reminds us later, ‘may – like some of the writings of Kafka – eerily anticipate the realities of the next.’ This, of course, was the starting-point of Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 treatise From Caligari to Hitler: but Professor Prawer finds broader and deeper justification for ...”

“... suddenly found themselves denounced by their students. A decent liberal anthropologist called Richard Newbold Adams, the doyen of US Guatemalan studies at the time and a distinguished professor at Austin, Texas, had worked in the rural areas in the Fifties and wrote a US Government-funded study entitled Receptivity to Communist-Fomented Agitation in Rural ...”

“... any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs ...”

“... from Buchenwald razed a public garden to create an open space suited to party rallies. On May Day 1937, Rudolf Hess laid the foundation stone of the Hall of the People’s Community, with standing room for two thousand. It is now a shopping centre. The huge administrative building for the local party remains, occupied by the Thuringian state ...”

“... man who escapes the nullness of life in posh London to become a scared, amateur spook in Beirut. Richard, the hero of Heart’s journey in Winter, is another ambiguous journalist-spy, this time in Cold War Germany. John Pitt’s historical moment – Iran during the Revolution – is the most dramatic of all, and his relationship with the British ...”

“... translated ‘On the Nature of Things’ or (as it is here) ‘On the Nature of the Universe’, may well be thought the best philosophy in classical Latin, superior to Cicero or Seneca in intellectual seriousness and sustained power of argument. Yet Cicero, who greatly admired him as a poet, never mentions him as a philosopher, and Seneca is equally ...”

“... class in the political struggle for its own emancipation. Cohen anticipates that his own position may meet with criticisms of this kind. The assertion of the primacy of productive forces is, he notes, considered demeaning to humanity… Those who take this line stigmatise the thesis as ‘technological determinism’, and complain that it presents machinery ...”