“... I mean use it in such a way that whatever they mean by it, it excludes what the term actually means. If physicalism is true, experience (consciousness) is wholly physical. For it certainly exists, and everything is wholly physical if physicalism is true. It follows that there are things about the nature of the physical that physics doesn’t ...”

“... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...”

“... the present – shouldn’t need repeating, though there’s a lingering literary prejudice which means that it does. Another way of putting it would be to say that good science fiction tells a number of particular untruths in order to reveal a more general truth, which is to say that it is in essence no different from any other kind of good fiction. Ballard ...”

“... a language, not of peace, but of decolonisation. The Western world knows what ‘decolonising’ means. It means you leave. Your settlers go home, and you do not regulate borders that are not yours. The best you can hope for, as the Americans knew in the Philippines and the British discovered in Kenya, is a long lease on a ...”

“... substance. The form of assembly politics allowed the staging and managing of collective action by means of more or less ritualised behaviour and with a certain regularity; the substance dealt with the relations between ‘rulers and the political community’. A distinctively participatory politics entered European practice and consciousness, not just at the ...”

“... where, in a thick haze of cigarette smoke, the administration of the hospital was thrashed out by means of a clamorous direct democracy. Foot is alert to the ways in which the archive photos of the general meetings conceal as well as reveal. They capture the buzz of mass participation but don’t register the absence of the many patients who chose to remain ...”

“... in the first of many such declarations of the way things are for women: ‘A husband at home means security, protection. Thieves keep away if a husband is present. Men respect each other. Women neighbours don’t wander in just like that to ask for salt, sugar, much less to bad-mouth the other neighbour. In a husband’s presence, a home is more of a ...”

“... 1948-67 (2010), he explores the way that the security apparatus gradually became Israel’s main means of interacting with and controlling the Palestinian community. Intelligence work – especially the recruitment and running of collaborators – has deepened Israeli penetration of Palestinian society, which served not only to strengthen Israel militarily ...”

“... self-denying heroines of earlier children’s literature: the moral had changed from ‘being good means giving up what you want’ to ‘indulging a desire for power brings out the darkness that’s inside you, kids’.The final volume of the first trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), ends with Ged going deep into the world of the dead to seal up a hole ...”

“... folks in all parts of the world.’ These connections have been discussed more recently by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2010), and by Juergen Zimmerer in From Windhoek to Auschwitz? (2019). The links between the genocide in South-West Africa and the Holocaust depend on something else that Zimmerer makes clear: the ...”

“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... in well-stocked libraries. A way of life that is in most essentials the exact opposite of a David Lodge novel, so that few of us care that the rest of the world smiles condescendingly at our shabby clothes, battered bicycles and collapsing brief-cases. And it is the job satisfaction that has gone. An increasing proportion of our time is devoted to ...”

“... mobility’ should not however be any cause for conservative alarm, as ‘caudillismo became a means to revive élitism and patriarchalism, allowing the élites to adapt rather than disappear, while society at large upheld its hierarchical form.’ One suspects that whatever happens, there will always be hierarchies in this narrative. There was, Professor ...”

“... particularly at the top. And shortly before the cabinet reshuffle the then employment secretary, David Hunt, actually spoke to the unions for the first time since anyone could remember. What that portended, of course, we will never know, since Mr Hunt has been replaced by the narrowest ideologue in the government; but it is unlikely that Mr Portillo will ...”

“... wavered in his view about how to defend them. Looking back over his work, Barry explains that like David Hume before him, Rawls has tried two arguments. The first, to which he’s been attracted, Barry believes, because it’s promised to produce a determinate result, is Glaucon’s, the argument from mutual advantage: we can gain more from co-operating with ...”