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“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... of Northern Irish unionists, Arthur Aughey, a devotee of the English conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, argued in the Belfast Telegraph that, since Brexit ‘intimated dis-union and radical disruption’, remaining in the EU would have been the prudent unionist option. But the Democratic Unionists have, bizarrely, spurned every chance at ...”

“... novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with ...”

“... political consensus. Then I remember E.M. Forster’s image for the force that speaks to Mrs Moore in the echo in the Marabar Caves: ‘Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity – the undying worm itself.’ It’s this sense of an unbudging, implacable destructiveness that ...”

“... a style itself by now relatively antiquated (of the great Post-Modernist names – Charles Moore, for instance – very little survives here; even the more familiar ones, like Michael Graves, are relatively defamiliarised within this extraordinarily overpopulated meteorological zone). The 24 ‘works’ – project ...”

“... job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a significant role in shaping the curriculum and methodologies these expanding departments ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... remembered, ‘and quickly conceded they could not arrest all of us, and let us through’. Michael Adams writes in his 1968 guide to Irish censorship that the officials who examined parcels of posted books in their office in Parnell Square sometimes took them home to be read at greater leisure. This arrangement had the advantage that a man could ‘ask ...”

“... Desmond’s larger politicising, cooperative work that includes The Politics of Evolution and the Moore-Desmond Darwin. Huxley didn’t drop his aspirates or hold the wrong fork: but timid Darwin had a deep assurance that brash Huxley could not simulate. The class difference between them might seem narrow for a historiographic contrast; but most of English ...”

“... he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had learnt their methods from G.E. Moore – Susan Stebbing and John Wisdom, for example – saw himself as above all in debt to and an adherent of the views and arguments of the Vienna Circle. But, in retrospect, what is remarkable is the extent to which he had already domesticated Austrian ...”

“... the big computer companies didn’t want to know. They couldn’t or wouldn’t know what Robert Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel, had already shown, which is that the density of circuits on the chips would double every 18 months. That axiom, enshrined as ‘Moore’s Law’, has held good throughout the three ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as Hope puts it, ‘gazing at us with a startlingly direct and unambiguous ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”