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“... a well-established genre. Comp. Lit. 102: readings in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mann, Gide, Sartre (and Martin Amis if time permits); little or no philosophical sophistication required. In the paradigmatic instances, the form is used to show how things look when viewed from the perspective of some or other philosophical assumptions, the philosophy itself being ...”

“... advanced Protestant ideas propagated by John Cheke, master of King’s and tutor to Edward VI, and Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg theologian and Regius Professor of Divinity in Edwardian Cambridge, as well as by his years in Basel, where English exiles gathered during the reign of Mary I. There he shared lodgings with the martyrologist John Foxe in a former ...”

“... and death count for little or nothing, the greatness of the soul for much or all’) and then on Gilbert Murray’s The Classical Tradition in Poetry, in 1928. In that review, Bailey called for ‘elevated subjects’, and cried: ‘If life be not a great thing, why speak of it at all?’ Against this, came Modernism’s plea for the fragmented, the ...”

“... doesn’t mention that they also brought six goshawks, two horses, four falcons, ‘one living martin’ (presumably as opposed to the dead furs), one crane and – mysteriously – two pelicans. The pelicans were kept in the king’s menagerie in St James’s Park, where three years later John Evelyn ‘examined the Throate of the Onocratylus or Pelecan ...”

“... Joy Division’s music was bleak, full of frustration, fear and guilt. They were produced by Martin Hannett, whose studio experience, though limited, had included work with another influential Manchester band, the Buzzcocks. His working practices often perplexed musicians, but were effective in this case: he slowed Joy Division’s music down, and ...”

“... and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most naturally, and most amusingly, ironic. And Iris Murdoch has written repeatedly that the definition of the great novel is the free and realised life it gives to its ...”

“... alternatives, he was drawn to the kibbutzim being organised in Palestine, and to the Zionism of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, who advocated the foundation of a binational state in Palestine, rather than a Jewish one. He stayed at Penn thanks to the presence there of Zellig Harris, a linguist and left-wing Zionist who was interested in ...”

“... The litany of gerunds in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell surpasses the mere fourteen offered by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (‘knowing, learning, discovering’ etc). The narrator of Glyph (1999) has yet to mark his first birthday but can already outsmart his poststructuralist father. Philosophers of language have been frequent subjects of his ...”

“... to each other, they scratched their heads and thought again of their unclubbable old professor. Gilbert Ryle – Collingwood’s successor in the Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy – wrote in 1970 of his rueful realisation ‘that my generation was at fault in not trying to cultivate our remote senior’. (Collingwood was 11 years older than him.) Even Ayer ...”

“... at being himself’. Why would a man already cartooned in Punch and burlesqued by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, which had opened in New York and other American cities months before his arrival, still ‘need’ America to ‘liberate’ him or to make him celebrated? In what sense is a man, not convicted of any crime until 1895, who was to ...”

“... to advertise the biddability of the Powhatan people. Privateers such as Francis Drake or Humphrey Gilbert covered their costs by raiding Spanish ships (which they passed off to the monarchy as a deniable form of warfare), or schemed to gain title to as much Indigenous land as possible before selling it off to subsidiaries. They were better at creating such ...”

“... new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash. But really, as Pinfold goes on to say, ‘most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters ...”

“... to have been committed, the fact is never, I believe, stated in so many words, whereas in Pincher Martin, where cannibal images abound, they are figurative of aggressive sexual or exploitative behaviour of a non-ingestive kind. Cannibal situations occur not infrequently in fictions of what might broadly be called the realist tradition, from Defoe ...”

“... to combine form and function, the K2, built out of cast iron to a neoclassical design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and painted a glossy Post Office red all over, came into service in 1927. It was as much emblem as shelter: ventilation came from holes pierced through the top fascia in the shape of a crown. The smaller and more durable K6, also designed by ...”

“... the Netherlands and, especially, England. Elizabethan voyages of exploration, like that led by Martin Frobisher to search for the Northwest Passage, or Humphrey Gilbert’s ill-fated trip to Newfoundland, made some modest gains (in knowledge if not in wealth). But mostly they conformed to the Spanish and French tragedy ...”