“... 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 What that portended, of course, we will never know, since Mr Hunt has been replaced by the narrowest ideologue in the government; but it is unlikely that Mr Portillo will ...”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 ...”

“... A penis in pickle, and a dreadful wife made to vanish into another dimension by means of an esoteric yoga pose. A narrator who rapes and murders his wife, gratified that the two climaxes coincide (‘I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her’). When he wakes up he vomits on the corpse, a reflex of horror and remorse that amounts to a further assault ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”

“... scarcely conveys the tense atmosphere as soldiers struggled to find a way across the river by any means; nor does he speculate on their state of mind, caught perhaps between a realisation that becoming a POW made good sense, and a desire to defend the homeland – already a landscape of bombed ruins – at all costs. More might have been saved from the ...”

“... to create a disciplined workforce and to the ways slaves resisted his demands. He was ‘by no means an easy man to work for’. He insisted that slaves and hired workers adhere to his own highly demanding work ethic. ‘I expect my people,’ he wrote to one overseer, ‘will work from daybreaking until it is dusk,’ a regimen which in summer, as ...”

“... The folds of gold satin fall elegantly around the body and the balance of Van Dyck’s composition means our gaze is drawn to the black sash tied just off-centre at the queen’s waist; crucially, below that, her hands are joined in a cradling gesture over her abdomen. She seems to offer her womb to the viewer: a royal pregnancy is after all a public ...”

“... to suffer. Retributive justice was important, but the caliphate also encouraged loyalty by other means. Tamimi has translated the lyrics of dozens of anasheed – patriotic anthems written and recorded by the state’s Ajnad Foundation for Media Production. They vary in quality. Removing the ‘stain of humiliation’ is a common theme, as are the glories ...”

“... when he sang, ‘He’ll sure write his name up and down your back,’ House replied: ‘That means beat you up.’) Seth plays the song to Carter; they both find it ‘mesmerising’. They stay up until six in the morning, ‘cleaning up the recording and deciphering the words’, filtering out the background noise until they have ‘a clear a ...”