“... person) as ‘indefinable … which he believes in a lively manner gives him ideas of whatever may be going forward externally’ – promoted in him ‘an almost irresistible inclination to visit different parts of his native country, in quest of knowledge or amusement’. At 26 he was not ready to pray away the rest of his life, to say nothing of ...”

“... have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history of philosophy as ...”

“... Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by ...”

“... autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle. But in fact he was a constructive man. Shooting an idea out of someone’s hand as soon as it came up, he would ...”

“... Cyber-warfare was now assumed to pose a greater threat to national security than terrorism. In May 2014, the attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that criminal charges had been laid against five Chinese military officials accused of hacking into US companies in order to gain trade secrets. In October 2014, as President Obama was preparing to make a ...”

“... Politics’ is a strange word, and the particular nature of its strangeness may explain why so many people feel confused by or alienated from political processes. It can refer high-mindedly to ‘the political ideas, beliefs or commitments of a particular individual’. But it can also be more or less value-neutral – or indeed suggest a complete lack of principle – when it is used to mean ‘activities or policies associated with government ...”

“... he up and he jumped in the water-hole, Drowning himself by the coolibah tree, And his ghost may be heard as it sings by the billabong, Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me? ‘Waltzing Matilda’, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1895) Three weeks before the American presidential vote, the political right was victorious in the Australian federal ...”

“... You’ll remember this. You may not live there anymore, and it might be years since you’ve been there, but you’ll recognise it instantly. Nothing has changed. Not a thing out of place, and not a detail altered: same views, same problems, same people, same faces, same old same old. ‘I feel violent with "hate” against this bloody town ...”

“... these first and then turn to the biography’s particular merits. Before going further, it may be helpful if I make clear my own starting-point – that of someone who is neither a Lorca expert, a biographer nor a literary critic. My concern, as a historian and writer, has for long been with the interaction of the social and the subjective. Bear this ...”

“... account over-subtle you will still grasp that its subject is a very different sort of person from Richard Hoggart, ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’ who at the Lady Chatterley trial succeeded, to the amazement and amusement of Our Age, in putting down ‘the Treasury counsel from Eton and Cambridge’. The single most irritating thing about this ...”

“... of his eyes/ was totally written-off,/ he was harnessed to a retinagraph’, ‘So that, though it may seem somewhat improbable,/ all that follows/ flickers and flows/ from the back of his right eyeball.’ What takes the reader through the poem is pleasure and puzzlement in roughly equal measure. Whatever Muldoon is, he isn’t the maths master type of ...”

“... with sufficient closeness. He furthermore suggests that Derrida’s evident lack of understanding may be traced to one of the few traits that his style of deconstruction has in common with A.J. Ayer’s brand of logical positivism: an irresistible urge to devalue the felicity of ordinary speech, one source for Cavell of his proper ‘voice’. This matter of ...”

“... Italian opera and those of (dramatic) French opera (Herbert Josephs), and on French Wagnerism (Richard Sieburth). Ideal site that it is in which to register the mutual exchanges between art-forms, the theatre does conspicuously well throughout this History, where drama is seen no longer simply as a script but as a mutable event, evolving in its own richly ...”

“... the farm labourer as bearing the huge symbolic weight that this culture has bestowed on him, since Richard Jefferies allowed Hodge to lumber into view, in the 1880s, a huge, romantic figure, of elemental simplicity of mind. Indeed, Evans’s earliest work can be clearly placed in the context of the neoromanticism of the Second World War and the early ...”

“... Ionce​ asked the great historian Richard Southern whether he would like to have met any of the medieval saints and churchmen about whom he wrote so eloquently. He gave a cautious reply: ‘I think they probably had very bad breath.’ He may have been right about that, but it would be wrong to infer that this was something which didn’t bother them ...”