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“... stands English comedy,’ David Frost is reported to have declaimed, as Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams stood side by side on his doorstep. Williams was unimpressed. ‘I thought to myself, “Then many people would be lacking in perception,” but shouted drunken goodbyes and reeled down the street into a taxi.’ What ...”

“... was namechecked as an early exponent of libertinism in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple, and Bernard Mandeville attracted a certain amount of knocking copy (‘Mandevil’) – but their reputations have been detoxified as Machiavelli’s hasn’t. In part that’s because of his irreligion and liking for blasphemy, which Leo Strauss claimed to find ...”

“... It was chaired by Victor Rothschild and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted ...”

“... over whether or not to murder Iphigenia. The point of this example (which as far as I know Bernard Williams was the first to use about pluralism) is meant to be that the gods lumber Agamemnon with rival options – whether to win a fair wind for the Greek fleet by sacrificing his daughter, or to go home with her, his mission a flop, to live out ...”

“... solidly built as the ships they service, against a sailor who finds that he is, in the words of Bernard Frechtmann’s translation, ‘a brown hatter’. But in his third novel, Pompes Funèbres, written in 1947, the oppostions are, as Peter Coe points out in his excellent 1968 study of Genet, beginning to show worrying signs of being out of control. In ...”

“... world. A final problem can be stated in terms of a current controversy over utilitarian theory. Bernard Williams has pointed to the dessicating effect of utilitarian calculation on the persons who make up their mind in this way, and underlined the importance of character even when not conducive to the maximisation of universal welfare. Derek Parfit has ...”

“... of the SDP. Now, in the columns of the LRB, they can talk to one another as Brian Magee and Bernard Williams no doubt talk in the Garrick. It is comforting to hear the bright minds of the political centre being so clubbable. Further to the left, space is made for Tam Dalyell to pursue his Belgrano studies. Things are a bit thin on the right, but ...”

“... and bourgeoisie at their most genteel, sentimental and dressy. Nothing more exasperated George Bernard Shaw than Sullivan’s habit of conducting in gloves, and nothing more exasperated Sullivan than Gilbert’s inverted universe of puppets and paradox. Regiments led from behind, sons older than their mothers, dysfunctional utopias, flying peers and ...”

“... But in this position, uncompromising commitment to a principle becomes a good in itself, or, as Bernard Williams explored in his last book, a higher authority is accorded to truthfulness (sincerity, assertion) than to truth (precision, accuracy). Ardent conviction proves more persuasive than accurate witnessing; intensity trumps scepticism and ...”

“... late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it ...”

“... not that I consciously went back to my childhood; my childhood came back to me.’ Alan Williams’s Republic of Images will become a standard work on the French cinema, and deservedly so. It is thorough, and intelligent, and its generalisations have clearly been hesitated over, thought about. It’s called a history of film-making, but as ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... the 1970s, and all three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a ...”

“... Sixties Cambridge had the moral fervour of Leavis and the political consciousness of Raymond Williams. There is some plausibility in the view that Eagleton is still a Cambridge man: in his essay ‘The Terry Eagleton Story’, Bernard Bergonzi pointed to the end of Literary Theory: An Introduction, with its expressed ...”

“... from midday till late evening, when he is slow and very slurred,’ according to the diary of Bernard Donoughue, one of his kitchen cabinet. Like Heath, Wilson was ill – ‘run-down’, as people used to say. Persistent colds, stomach pains, a racing heart, moments of forgetfulness and bewilderment: all of these attended cabinet meetings along with the ...”