“... so devoted to ideals of womanly self-abnegation. After reading this book, and after revisiting John Sutherland’s biography of Mrs Humphry Ward, I felt the need to remind myself of John StuartMill’s incisive argument for women’s emancipation. ...”

“... way of saying "not yet” to somebody else.’ To illustrate what he means, he turns to John StuartMill’s On Liberty and On Representative Government – ‘both of which,’ Chakrabarty says, ‘proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans ...”

“... James Joyce valued the everyday, but only if it could be grist to the mill of his highly formal art. Yeats endured ‘the baptism of the gutter’, descending into the profane world only to gather it into the artifice of poetic eternity, and Joyce’s aesthetic was similarly redemptive. He would grub among the odds and ends of secular history so as to salvage them for an art which was concerned with nothing but itself ...”

“... did even ten years ago, and is more or less unrecognisable as the terrain explored by Bentham and Mill. The view that utility consists in pleasure and the absence of pain, or even (G.E. Moore’s view) in the presence of mental states of intrinsic worth, has very much fallen from prominence. Utility as now conceived is grounded firmly in the fulfilment of ...”

“... In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill in his History of British India as one of the first to put the knife in. On the question of India, Mill says, Burke neither stretched his eye to the whole of the subject, nor did he carry its vision to the bottom. He was ...”

“... though even less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the ...”

“... for the diversity of opinion and freedom of information on which correct decision-making depends. John StuartMill’s Considerations on Representative Government is probably the most lucid defence of democracy in these terms. The difficulty here, however, is the widely accepted ignorance and fickleness of the ...”

“... from which one nationality was scarcely distinguishable from another. Bentham and James Mill thought the subject of national character would have a place in a rational science of legislation, but agreed that as things stood appeals to national character were largely an aspect of political abuse – a view spelled out in one of ...”

“... scholarship, has the better of this debate. It has been convincingly shown that the martyrologist John Foxe’s admiring account was based on good evidence. In less than a fortnight of the spring of 1536, and almost in two days, the world of Anne Boleyn fell apart. The queen was charged and found guilty of multiple adultery, and all too soon she, together ...”

“... as the poems began to find their way into the world: a copy of Pauline has been handed to J.S. Mill! And also the impact of critical responses. This was Mill’s verdict: ‘With considerable poetic powers, this writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane ...”

“... he was the Brexit Party, before he was Ukip? Farage insists that he started out as a run-of-the-mill Tory – just another true-blue Thatcherite – until the Conservative Party’s craven attitude towards Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith. Recollections vary, however. According to Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow ...”

“... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...”