“... of mind? One thinks here of Isaiah Berlin’s distinction in his famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, which begins with its quotation from the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Some thinkers spend their entire lives mining one or two central ideas, building and ...”

“... tracing the links between one family and the next, is constructed around the metaphor of a fox-hunt: ‘having started a fox in the Pytchley country, we pursue it on a 200-mile point straight across the Midlands, ending on the edge of the Beaufort. So in our pursuit of this class we will start from one family and ...”

“... winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La Fontaine must take some of the blame. He was an awkward kind of ...”

“... upon the troubled passage of the Revolution’s reputation across the centuries. The deposition of James left the English with a guilty conscience which they have never shaken off. The men who drove the lawful hereditary ruler from the throne and replaced him by a usurping Dutchman searched vainly for a theory to justify their coup. They might claim that ...”

“... which can be caricatured as the statement that brains act like computers. It is made easier fox the author to believe by the outdated, simplistic view of the individual neuron (almost like a logic gate in a computer) which he describes on page 340. A few pages later, the book suggests that he is acquainted with some of the long-established evidence for ...”

“... about her fellow New Zealander, the writer Janet Frame. In the film we see Frame, played by Kerry Fox, recently released from a long spell in a mental hospital, given shelter and support by a white-goateed older writer called Frank Sargeson, played by Martyn Sanderson. She lives and types in his garden shed, finishes a novel, and sends it off to a publisher ...”

“... for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once queering his pitch at the New Statesman. ‘Effete onanist’ was one of the things he said about me. About himself he wrote with even more feeling: ‘In those days, I had no revolutionary ideology to sustain me, nothing but a ...”

“... Sonia Levien (1880-1960), whose papers the Huntington owns. Levien was a story editor at Fox, MGM and Paramount, and her screenwriting credits include State Fair (1933), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1940), Quo Vadis? (1951) and Interrupted Melody (1955), for which she won the Academy Award. The Library also possesses the papers of Catherine ...”

“... vetting, a successor who would embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he ...”

“... can manage much better with the dead, for they are silent.’ Kierkegaard, in short, is a fox who easily outruns Hegel; Hegel a hedgehog who rolls into a ball. As thinkers they are entirely incompatible. Except that Rose completely disagrees.‘This work begins instead by exploring the diremption of law and ethics as it appears not between but within ...”

“... Anglican right-wingers also turned their fire on aristocratic ‘friends of liberty’. Charles Fox and his cronies, with their flagrantly libertine lifestyles, were easy targets, made easier for Pittite loyalists by their own hero’s reputation for sexual purity. ‘Public men’ such as Fox and Pitt had always been ...”

“... you’d watch once, at a regular hour (even as late as 1997, CNN and Sky News were quite niche; Fox News had just started up, and the BBC’s 24-hour news channel launched that autumn). After the network news, there would be the local TV bulletin. Some evenings, there were news specials, longer shows like CBS’s 60 Minutes, ITV’s World in Action or the ...”

“... action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book takes a different approach. In an effort to get away from the ‘big meta-narrative’, Walvin presents biographical sketches of three participants in Britain’s 18th-century slave economy. John Newton (1725-1807) was a slave captain ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... codes were second nature. Her greatest friend, Bessie Parkes, and her drawing teacher, Eliza Fox, were both daughters of famous Unitarian public men. Robinson admits her surprise on discovering that ‘libertarianism was accommodated so readily’ in an era she had previously seen as ‘stiflingly straitlaced and intolerant’.Unitarians thought ...”