“... and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian ...”

“... groundbreaking experiments were undertaken by Nikos Logothetis, working with Jeffrey Schall and David Leopold. It had been known since the 19th century that if quite different images are shown to each of your eyes at the same time, your conscious experience doesn’t blend the two but flips between them. If one of your eyes is shown a face and the other is ...”

“... with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting enough, but, within the realm of what was manageable, did the May government marshal its counsellors as effectively as it could have done? Cameron’s European advisers had deliberately ...”

“... Ayacucho, one of the most backward and isolated towns of the Peruvian Andes, whose name in Quechua means ‘Corner of the Dead’, in memory of those who fell in 1824 in the decisive battle between Bolivar’s forces, under Sucre, and those loyal to the Spanish Crown. Thus Ayacucho can be considered the birthplace of the modern Peruvian state, and may yet ...”

“... haunted demeanour of a beaten man. The desperate logic of America’s sound-bite democracy means that between now and polling day Bush might try to revive his flagging popularity by resuming military strikes against the man he now refers to as the ‘Merchant of Death’. But if American lives were to be lost as a consequence, the electoral damage ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... OWN PRIVATE DICTATOR-MUZZLER. POSITIVELY NO CONNECTION WITH ANY OTHER ESTABLISHMENT. By this means Low made the attempt to censor him a target for satire, and cunningly enlisted his readers in his defence. These examples illustrate a further aspect of Low’s humour: his generous use of words, not merely as captions but as a complete running ...”

“... a good title. The word does not appear in the Chambers Dictionary but Webster’s tells us that it means ragweed in Britain, and knapweed, blueweed or blue vervain in the United States. We associate the word ‘weed’ with something contemptible, to be got rid of: but in America it also suggests toughness and freedom – so that they can say ‘militarism is ...”

“... claiming a kind of coincidence with it’. The novel, he says, is ‘social intercourse by other means’. The same conviction is enforced in Bayley’s Selected Essays, a gathering of his fairly recent writings. The writers he deals with, except for Pushkin, are those whose work has happened to come up for review: a new collection, a biography, a ...”

“... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...”

“... their defenders ought to lean over backwards to be simple, clear and explicit. Donald Davidson and David Pears have recently made pioneering attempts to render elements of Freud’s theory in terms comprehensible to analytical philosophers and empirical psychologists. Instead of following their lead, Wollheim retreats to the more comfortable procedure of ...”

“... 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 ...”