“... and particularly when she is talking about pornography she gives a rhetorical display which may well have been breathtaking in the lecture hall. But the book does in fact offer a legal argument, one which is interesting, and also deeply American, in the sense that MacKinnon discusses the problems raised by pornography and also by speech that constitutes ...”

“... rarely in accord, but they do at least agree on this: that the poor are always with us. Chastity may have gone the way of all flesh, and obedience may have been banished from the marriage service, but poverty – grinding, inexorable, ineradicable – remains: not a state voluntarily embraced on the road to salvation, but ...”

“... vague about how we are going to reach our promised destination; and after a while, we may begin to wonder whether he knows the way himself. It is hard to see, for example, how the kinds of hard chronological evidence that appeal to an event-oriented historian will ever get a useful purchase on the nature of truth in general. Fernández-Armesto ...”

“... wildly unexpected consequences. With hindsight, it’s obvious which is which. Now and then we may devote a sententious moment to thanking our good judgment or good fortune that we decided to do the right thing – right because it worked out so happily. But we surely spend far more time in rueful contemplation of opportunities missed, or agonised remorse ...”

“... feature of a neurone in the brain) or a biochemical property (such as the potency of an enzyme), may be imagined as occupying a discrete point on a metaphorical landscape that contains the array of all possible variants of that characteristic. In the case of a camel’s hump, for example, the landscape would contain humps the size of the Post Office ...”

“... women who were accomplished scientists or artists or explorers. In the monotheistic traditions we may also still need straightforward reminders that divinities need not be male. Goddesses and heroines may not be career models, yet a retelling of myths which emphasises heroic women and female deities casts a surprising new ...”

“... to American women I used to wonder why they didn’t go on strike: ‘No equality, no kids!’ It may be that something like that is happening in those countries where family structure and masculine attitudes are in radical conflict with women’s desire for emancipation. Catholic Italy and Spain, of all places, have the lowest fertility rates in the world ...”

“... if the purée is cash, and the aim is to give each person as good a life as possible, this end may not be well served by handing a person whatever income fills the gap between her actual earnings and, say, half the national average, or some other benchmark. As Amartya Sen has shown elsewhere, it’s not what you have that counts, so much as what you can do ...”

“... some killings, like the A-bombing of Japanese cities in 1945, are on a grand scale, and this, it may be said, makes them evil. But it is hard to credit that there’s some critical mass, beyond which the moral account tips – for some n, killing n civilians is bad, but n + 1 is evil. Of course, the progression could be sorites. Sorites shows that ...”

“... collapse of the market liberal order was underway at the time he gave his speech at the LSE. It may be that the programme he presented expresses deeply considered convictions. More likely, it reflects the workings of an acutely intelligent and at the same time highly conventional political mind. The market ideology of the 1980s Conservative Party has been ...”

“... by what the markets would permit. One of Osborne’s first acts on entering the Treasury in May 2010 was to establish an in-house Office of Budget Responsibility, a kind of financial superego that would judge whatever fiscal announcements emanated from Whitehall. When Osborne told the Conservative Party conference in 2012 that ‘We’re all in this ...”

“... sage in point of approachability. To experience the sage, you must have read his work; the meeting may come later, and may disappoint. With the guru, personal contact matters most and the first encounter must succeed; the writing need only offer a clue to the presence. Paul de Man said enough memorable things to be quoted ...”

“... computers, apps and storage systems that hold personal data. The new Data Protection Act passed in May defines personal data as any information relating to an identified or identifiable living individual; as well as our names, addresses and dates of birth, this now includes markers of our digital identities, such as IP addresses and biometric data. The new ...”

“... not, admittedly, that war as such is about to cease, but that ‘large-scale conventional war ... may indeed be at its last gasp,’ he must expect, in spite of his formidable reputation as a military historian, to be greeted with a certain degree of scepticism. Dr van Creveld has been almost as unfortunate in his timing as H.N. Brailsford. Within a few ...”

“... echoes of Donne, Herbert, Quarles, Marvell, Horace, Ovid and others. Occasionally, a historian may wish he had considered other, less literary, sources: we may wonder, for example, whether the image of the river overflowing its banks in ‘The Advice’ owes anything to Strafford’s defence to Article Four of his ...”