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“... their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her father had more or ...”

“... is structured around discussions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright). All the same, it ‘opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical black intellectual past’, Robinson explained in an interview in 2013. ‘As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the terms that he ...”

“... David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian right. We should not discount the vital progressive function performed by a learned clergy exposed to ...”

“... Plato has ‘an uncontestable claim to pre-eminence’ among the ancients. A few years ago Bernard Williams offered his list of the attributes that might make a great philosopher. He looked for intellectual power and depth; a grasp of the sciences; a sense of the political, and of human destructiveness as well as creativity; range and ...”

“... of the work of a British artist. It is also one of the dullest. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams have resisted the tendency of the last fifteen years or so by which the catalogues of major exhibitions have often been presented as major interpretative studies of the artist and his times. Constable is a catalogue, nothing more. It maximises our ...”

“... stop asking about the source or ground of obligation. Other Kant-bashing books – notably Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity, an acute and sensitive rethinking of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy – have pointed out that some cultures, notably that of pre-Socratic Greece, enabled people to live very rich (and, if it comes to that, very manly) moral lives ...”

“... of the human spirit, which there is no reason to believe he ever entirely abandoned. For Raymond Williams, Establishment-bred leftists who finally revert to type can be seen as cases of what he calls in Culture and Society ‘negative identification’. The dissident offspring of the upper middle class throws in his lot with the militant proletariat, largely ...”

“... resolved themselves into a Scottish Parliament which has struggled to live up to expectations. Richard Leonard, elected as the new leader of Scottish Labour last month, ran on a platform condemning the ‘managerialism’ that has characterised both Labour and the SNP’s approach to devolved government since 1999, pledging to ‘stretch every sinew’ of ...”

“... But there were moments of real conversation and he spoke of real grievances,’ Adeline Vaughan Williams wrote after one of many visits with her husband, Gurney’s one-time teacher of composition, admirer and longstanding advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick ...”

“... paragraph to go, to deny the evident rationale of his book. And Brivati needs a rationale: Philip Williams’s monumental biography of Gaitskell is unlikely to be equalled, let alone surpassed. Not only was Williams the greatest political analyst of his time but he had access to the voluminous private papers which, since ...”

“... chosen range. Is it the fear of spreading too widely? Among living writers she does not mention Richard Altick, Raymond Williams or Anthony Smith. Nor does she speculate about newspapers and books, which co-existed easily or sometimes uneasily on W.H. Smith bookstalls, although she has a brief and useful section on ...”

“... had written Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and All My Sons, Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar, Camino Real and The Rose Tattoo, but if Osborne shows any American influence it is from the earlier generation of O’Neill, or even Odets. There were intermittently fine productions on the London stage: ‘revivals’ of ...”

“... the extreme Left would like to go. Since then, the cameras have zoomed in unrelentingly on Shirley Williams and the Council for Social Democracy. When the mass media wake up to an issue, they seldom give it a rest. Is it too late for them to wake up to Europe, and dispel the public ignorance which all demagogues ...”

“... be something in philosophy that counts as ‘getting it right’. In this, it properly rejects Richard Rorty’s model for the future of philosophy (or rather, as he sees it, of what used to be philosophy), the model of a conversation. Unless a conversation is very relentless – for instance, one between philosophers – it will not be held together by ...”

“... verse, as opposed to more traditional or mainstream poets such as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur – the sorts likely to be published in the New Yorker and awarded Pulitzers. In those days, you were on one side or the other. Creeley was defiantly on The New American Poetry side, and his work figures prominently in that hugely influential ...”