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“... and it has to be faced. To invent something more elevated and comfortable, the kind of thing that Robert Nozick offered in his Philosophical Explanations (a book that Williams described as an attempt at the ‘Great American Novel of philosophy’), will not do. Some of the analytical arguments in the book were brilliant, but at the end Nozick departed from ...”

“... for three years as an infantry officer in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied ...”

“... West Park Row, which he shares with his second wife, Johanna, and their two children, Eva and Michael. Arthur’s first wife, Franziska, was killed at Auschwitz, but his memories of her are so vivid that he is able to project images from their past together onto the wall of the title, a symbol, for him, of both the limits of meaning and of his ...”

“... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...”

“... When the surviving German war criminals were put on trial at Nuremberg, the American prosecutor Robert Jackson told the judges that ‘the real complaining party at your bar is civilisation.’In 1945, the victorious Allies faced many of the same problems they thought they had faced in 1918. But the destructive effects of ‘barbarism’ were now greater ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... pretty coarse at the arts of primitive accumulation), the promotions of Charles Keating (S&Ls) and Michael Milken, high priest of the junk bond, now facing ten years in the Federal penitentiary. There’s rarely been a city harder to ‘see’, through a windscreen caked with the alternative myths of the boosters and the noirs, nor one about whose history and ...”

“... jobs). As a manual of good practice it adds to rather than radically supplanting other such works. Michael Balint’s The Doctor, his Patient and the Illness, first published in 1957, makes many similar points about the importance of treating the whole patient rather than the single ailment. Its focus is on the doctor-patient relationship as an important part ...”

“... Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As Dearborn notes in a wonderful chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller’s Paris address, ‘most of the editors were ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”

“... Wordsworth’s genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always remained outside them. He never seems identified with his own discoveries, even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment ...”

“... effort, a novel about a historian of the Nazis who is also a Nazi sympathiser – in 1995, Robert Kelly, in a somewhat grudging review in the New York Times, spoke honestly about the prompt reviewer’s quandary: ‘It is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds ...”

“... The only signs of fresh pictorial intelligence in the exhibition come from two Englishmen, John Michael Wright and John Riley, whose portraits presage the comic tones of the 18th century, and from the Flemish Jacob Huysmans. Huysmans, like Orazio Gentileschi before him, was a protégé of the queen whose waywardness could be indulged: his portrait of Queen ...”

“... Many Hollywood stars, for example, attend AA, but you won’t find yourself sitting next to Michael Douglas unless you happen to be in the industry and making seven-figure alimony payments. There is no copyright on the 12-step formula and any number of look-alike therapies have borrowed it: Al-Anon, Al-Ateen, Chocanon, MA (Marijuana Anonymous), Weight ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”