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“... of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of ...”

“... reviews. The verse is of a high standard. We see poems that helped establish the reputations of James Fenton and Craig Raine; poems by Heaney and Lowell; and Peter Porter’s ‘An Australian Garden’, which counts among his best things. Of the short stories, ‘Solid Geometry’ is a reminder that TNR played host to Ian McEwan when he was still regarded ...”

“... at Southern Georgia University in 1993, is a celebration of the stylistic elaborations in Henry James’s travel writings, literary criticism and autobiographical works, most of which belong to his later or, as it is often called, major phase that includes, more famously, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Tanner takes evident ...”

“... Maisie knew, The Go-Between, many other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young ...”

“... On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York. The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for tickets. The audience was strange; in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell ...”

“... Henry James​ liked to represent himself as hopelessly lagging behind his older brother, but he was also very good at turning childish inadequacy to imaginative account. A year after William’s death in 1910, he set out to edit a selection of William’s letters only to end up producing a remarkable self-portrait ...”

“... would have hit upon without benefit of the largely psychoanalytic philosophy he developed in his William James lectures of 1982, published as The Thread of Life, and elsewhere. There may seem to be an initial danger of circularity, in that those meanings would be invisible to someone not privy to the psychology enlisted to explain them. My ...”

“... Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent ...”

“... fable was earlier posed, as she acknowledged, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by William James in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. Ishiguro’s novels pose versions of it too, if not with such immediate horror.In Never Let Me Go, for instance, the child isn’t alone, and Kathy and her companions aren’t miserable. Their ...”

“... analysis of the complex linguistic territory of speech as a form of action was presented as the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955 and published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words. It is his most enduring theoretical contribution to the philosophy of language. And he may have thought of it as a contribution to a larger project ...”

“... lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language from law French, and were usually glossed as meaning ‘design’ or ‘intend’. The ...”

“... have been more surprised at Frederick’s posthumous reputation than his father, King Frederick William I (1713-40). The Hohenzollern dynasty was unusually lucky; for almost three centuries, they managed to produce relatively healthy, relatively sane males, who all lived long enough to avoid the struggles for succession of so many of Europe’s ruling ...”

“... two decades after the poem was published, during a dinner party, Hecht’s best friend, William MacDonald, mentioned that the Dacian wars had lasted only two or three years, not fifteen. Hecht was shocked, and spent the entire night searching for his source, only to find it completely mistaken. He was angry with himself but furious that MacDonald ...”

“... advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly observed’. He accepts Hazlitt’s judgments as ...”

“... time come round for a genuine narrative dénouement. Pragmatism – good old American pragmatism, James and Dewey style – is the looked-for issue out of all philosophical perplexities. The pragmatist has no use for truth-claims, unless by defining them provisionally in terms of ‘warranted assertability’. Truth is simply, as ...”