“... Note that the quality Johnson’s fans most applaud in him is cheerfulness, something Theresa May was never going to offer, suggesting that she may have missed the point of Brexit all along. The summer has taken on a carnivalesque quality; normal constraints around public speech have been suspended for the duration of a ...”

“... of a scientific examination of nature. The conscientious study of nature or of sexual technique may or may not provide the answer to the tides or the allure of particular women, but the assumption is that God-given won’t do and that an answer to the question does exist even if it cannot be found yet, or by me. At any ...”

“... life chances provided by the economic, social and technical resources of a society. Institutions may be an adequate, in formal terms a flexible, open, response to these forces: if and as long as this is the case, there are not liable to be doubts in legitimacy [sic] to any considerable extent. It is, however, conceivable – and indeed at times inevitable ...”

“... to us of the poverty of Christ, and of the burdens of a life of pious poverty, in a way that may again seem a too obviously salutary reminder to the consciences of rich and poor alike. If this is an idea Gainsborough was trying out for a full-scale painting, it’s not very surprising that he rejected it: the sympathy of the polite was certainly open to ...”

“... Upper Amazon (2009), Stephan Beyer speculates that the combination of plants in the ayahuasca brew may have been developed for its spectacular purgative qualities as much as its visionary ones.The global spread of ayahuasca has been driven by two overlapping beliefs in its possibilities: as a life-changing spiritual experience and as a miraculous healing ...”

“... even if he can find a way to do so while keeping the debt brake intact – the SPD and Die Linke may still be in a position to extract concessions on social spending, although the CDU could just as easily use increased military spending as an excuse for belt-tightening elsewhere.A kind of dual shadowing of the two former Volksparteien (‘people’s ...”

“... insects’, ‘our traditional hay meadows’, ‘our Wild Isles’) suggests that the filmmakers may have succumbed to a degree of post-Brexit isolationism, even a form of eco-nationalism, however unconscious.It needn’t be the work of a nature documentary to ask who ‘we’ are, but Wild Isles raises the question repeatedly without examining it. The scene ...”

“... who is said to be buried in the city). Glimpsing the Kaaba in Mecca for the first time, the women may have recalled traditions casting the building as a bride, with its sacred and inviolable nature hidden beneath gold-embroidered cloth. Near Medina was the Garden of Women, where a well provided water said to heal seventy female ailments; inside the city, not ...”

“... us reality.’ What professional psychologists or Martin’s professional colleagues may make of this I don’t know: it is not my country. Although we do not encounter ‘isons’ elsewhere, the first three chapters of the book in fact cover very similar ground in a different tone of voice. But the final chapter on ‘culture and ...”

“... Guiana, and dominates operations like the attempted ‘destabilisation’ of Manley in Jamaica. It may be an MI6 man who is ambassador to Mauritius, close to the Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia. But the US calls the shots. The British have tried to plug the dyke of disclosures. They exerted heavy pressure on the United States not to let British material ...”

“... ago? Well, no, is Castle’s answer, and in a way she’s right. Lesbian-feminist theoreticians may have succeeded in making the lesbian into almost the representative woman, but it’s been at the cost of vanishing her, making her into a figure for absence of identity, and anti-essence. She has stood for the disembodied euphoria of a feminine gender always ...”

“... Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to be different: to establish which parts of Marxism are still defensible and which are not, and to scrutinise the idea of self-ownership that has played a central role in recent libertarian thought, especially in North America. To these tasks Cohen ...”

“... one might argue that whatever the nature of the problem of ‘explaining what-it’s-like-ness’ may be (if it is a genuine problem at all), it cannot be a problem for physics because physics concerns itself only with factors needed to predict the trajectories of particles and fields, and Strawson has given no reason to think that the additional ideas which ...”

“... and non-Scottish currents; on the other hand, there is a danger that his echt Donnishness may be submerged. The Paterson obsessed with his Alexandrian library, trawling up books, odd facts and titles – the ‘informationist’ Paterson – belongs to a Scottish grouping and tradition whose ancestors include Carlyle’s Professor Teufels-dröckh and ...”

“... He is certainly correct to say that ornament has never found its home in aesthetic theory, and may be right in attributing this to ornament’s resistance to romantic notions of artistic creation and contemplation. Adolf Loos may have expressed something highly characteristic of modern thought, and not just of Modernist ...”