20 NOVEMBER 1993, Page 42

Hilary Corke

Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (Hodder, £19.99), though perhaps written with a slightly blunt quill, is a mine of forgotten early-18th-century scurrility, manly and unsentimental.

Philosophy in general is way above my little head, a wool-snaggle of incomprehen- sible curlicues around matters that seem, In a literal, just as much as a metaphorical, sense, neither here nor there. But I have enjoyed pecking about in Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Penguin, £8.99) which has been made relatively assimilable by the intellectual ministrations of the kindly author.