“... To worry in this way, you need to take seriously the question whether our descriptions of Reality may not be all too human, all too influenced by our hopes and fears. It helps to anguish about whether Reality (and therefore Truth as well) may not stand aloof, beyond the reach of the sentences in which we formulate our ...”

“... was at art college. At the end of that year, Lily took a job with William Morris’s daughter, May, who taught her to embroider the complicated Morris patterns and to transfer designs to fabric. She was friendly with May, and often ate with the family, but she was not encouraged to make her own designs, and quickly found ...”

“... yet intrepidly New soothings, new amazements That cornets introduce at every turn – And you may fall downstairs with me With perfect grace and equanimity. Crane may be trying to tell us how we should read him, but the instructions are strewn with necessary impossibilities. To do anything with deliberate naivety ...”

“... quantity of writing that Russell produced in his lifetime almost defies belief.’ Russell may have experienced himself as a ghost: but he was an unusually articulate one. Monk was even more struck by what he called, in a characteristically prudent phrase, Russell’s ‘detailed self-absorption’. All this, one might think, would be something of a ...”

“... warning: his history of metaphysics is not what you get in books on the history of philosophy. It may not be until page 379 that the penny will drop, for there Rée seems to say in passing that metaphysics consists of ‘the more or less unconscious myths, maxims and metaphors we live by’, Oh. One of the pleasures of the book is that its topics are made ...”

“... sums are involved, the extent of his risk aversion). The microdynamics of the social interaction may be significant: even when playing with strangers, the figure one cuts in their eyes may matter. Nevertheless, a simple conclusion is that players of the ultimatum game are oriented to a norm that enjoins ‘fairness’, and ...”

“... coupling of Foucault’s study with the canonical texts of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement may have been fortuitous but it was to prove lasting. Folie et déraison appeared in an abridged translation in 1967 in a series on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born ...”

“... the emotional aim of intercourse,’ he writes, is a total knowing of the other, gay sex may be, in its way, perfect, because in it, a total knowledge of the other’s experience is, finally, possible. But since the object of that knowledge is already wholly known to each of the parties, the act is also, in a way, redundant. Perhaps it is for this ...”

“... funding and operations of Arab-based terrorist groups. As for Europe, British military support may be unconditional, but most European countries – Russia among them – are likely to restrict their help to intelligence and policing. Apart from the fact that most European armies are useless when it comes to serious warfare, they are already showing great ...”

“... conflicts, insofar as they were inseparable from them. On the other hand, Latin America may not have seen armies crossing state frontiers in the 20th century, but it has been the scene of major civil conflicts: in Mexico after 1911, for instance, in Colombia since 1948, and in various Central American countries during period II. It is not generally ...”

“... because it begins to dawn on one that several of Anderson’s key analytic co-ordinates may have altered in form – and altered in relation to one another – even in the brief period since he first laid them out. This would be very remarkable if true, because the structures he pointed to as generative of nations have survived (through various ...”

“... multimedia work provocative enough to entice the public back to contemporary art galleries they may have visited many times already.Richter somehow manages to do both. On the one hand, he uses an oversized squeegee to make huge colourful abstracts that can sell for £20 million each; on the other, he is the creator of austere constructions in ...”

“... on the labour market and the welfare state in the UK. In 2019, the then prime minister, Theresa May, declared Britain’s mental health record one of the ‘burning injustices’ she aimed to remedy. But now that levels of economic inactivity and government spending on disability benefits are on the rise – driven especially since Covid-19 by the number of ...”

“... for our adventures with others, a provisional set of assumptions that can be modified, but which may be resistant to modification, about what someone else is likely to say or do. We are surprised, sometimes, when our imagined idea of another person’s character is overturned by the reality of their behaviour – and novels and dramas and even epics often ...”

“... his death in 1963, he sent a message from his hospital bed to the Poetry Society of America: ‘I may wobble when I’m sitting up but I never waver.’ These declarations of independence sound reassuringly like the Frost of the anthologies, the author of ‘guidebooks for the spirit of individualism’, as Robert Faggen puts it, attracted to empty woods and ...”