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“... to bitter ends. Finally, they are supposed to be learned and wise. They are expected to have read all that has been written in response to the layman’s large questions, and to rearrange it in novel and luminous dialectical patterns, sympathetically harmonising all the suggestions offered by all the great dead philosophers. Since philosophy became ...”

“... Reading Richard Wollheim’s study of what it is to live the life of a person was a frustrating, painful experience. Perhaps it can best be summarised by saying that while the book goes to great lengths to ensure precision in the second decimal, it leaves us in the dark about the first. Wollheim has a marvellously knowledgeable and intelligent mind ...”

“... this immortal ‘me’. Discussing a study of 1883 entitled Walt Whitman and written by his friend Richard Bucke, he insists to Traubel that his endorsement of the book was never meant to extend to its interpretations: as to his explication – no, no, no – that I do not accept – for Leaves of Grass baffles me, its author, at all points of its meaning ...”

“... years, who answered his advertisements in the newspaper for anyone willing for a fee to talk or read to him or otherwise make themselves useful. One such was Eddie Simms, chauffeur, manservant, confidant and raconteur, who claimed to have been a professional ice-skater, and a baseball-player, and to have driven for Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian ...”

“... art. And, as a writer, he has evolved a distinctive style – though, so naturally does his prose read, it seems odd to talk of evolution – which enables him to convey with great precision the results of the eager, exploratory way he looks at works of art. Schapiro, it hardly needs to be said, brings to the understanding of art a great deal more than the ...”

“... If you want to know what the common sense of the bookish will be like fifty years from now, read the philosophers currently being attacked as ‘irrationalist’. Then discount the constructive part of what they are saying. Concentrate on the negative things, the criticisms they make of the tradition. That dismissal of the common sense of the past will be the enduring achievement of the long-dead ‘irrationalist ...”

“... reflected in one intriguing lacuna in this volume of the biography. We must wait for Volume Two to read just what occurred in late 1907, in one single room in the Salon d’Automne, a room which has been movingly described for us by Rilke in a sequence of letters, a room in which, as Rilke put it, ‘all of reality’ lay on the painter’s side – for it was ...”

“... to think about you. There is no need to find out what your neighbours feel or need, much less to read books. For you already have everything that matters, deep down inside. It is natural that this comfortable view should find expression in an exceptionally primitive religion – the New Age movement – for it amounts to identifying your self with God. All ...”

“... in the sea, would build a boat, – shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world. I would read no reviews – talk with no authors ... On this plan I would be alone – would devote either to oblivion or to future generations the overflowings of [my] mind ...’ The passage is quoted both by Paul Dawson and Claire Tomalin, and I can give no better ...”

“... Same at Home? (Picador, £15.99). The narrator is a TV presenter, as, of course, is Mark Lawson. Richard Fleming is not the presenter of BBC2’s Review, however; not even in the way that Lawrence Castle, the Prime Minister in the novel, ‘is’ Tony Blair, and President Riley ‘is’ Bill Clinton (the novel’s set in 1999). In Lawson’s imaginings, the ...”

“... are fellow-travellers of the United States necessarily think that country a great place. We had read, for instance, Gide’s book. But what we did think was that Communism was an indispensable ally in the fight against Fascism. It gave the fight authenticity. Without Communism on our side Fascism would either be left intact or be replaced by something ...”

“... marshals of Württemberg, and ADCs general to the Russian tsar’. Such men routinely spoke and read not only their native language but also French, still the language of diplomacy long after the First World War, and English, usually because they’d been brought up by a British nanny, an essential member of the household for the European nobility. Wilhelm ...”

“... avant-garde – Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as ...”

“... degree a theorist, he was concerned only with a story’s effect on the people who paid to read it. His sense of audience is most evident in the recurrent comments he made in the Sixties, when the morbid Victorian susceptibility to ‘offence’ was at its height. (Georgina Podsnap, the archetypical adolescent girl whose maiden blushes the entire ...”

“... call any writing “prophetic”, but the closing two pages of this last letter of Ling’s read now as if they had been designed as an epilogue and benediction to the hopes and fears of China’s long revolution, and to the millions who died for the future, whether in the anti-Rightist campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, or ...”