“... to live within constant striving. It is hard to live within the word ‘degenerative’, which means that, however I strive, I do not win.Of course everyone is striving all their life. And none of us will win against mortality. But there is a difference between striving to (say) learn ancient Greek or do the vacuuming and striving to pay microscopic ...”

“... his conscience clean while others did the dirty work: it required determined resistance to war by means of direct action. Pacifism – as well as poetry – led him to Herbert Read, Britain’s most famous anarchist, and he absorbed many of Read’s ideas. The state became the primary target of his political critique. Drawing on psychoanalysis, he argued that ...”

“... and political one.An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man ...”

“... of ‘free trade unions’ prescribed by KOR: Kuron’s vision of ‘free association’ as a means of regenerating the Party from outside was as radical as anything dreamed up by the Czech intellectuals. To have held back from such attractions would probably have required more wisdom and courage than Solidarity’s leaders or followers ...”

“... of the correlation of forces: while Khrushchev could have chosen global war, he did not have the means to protect his ships at sea or his military forces in Cuba. Once it was absolutely clear that Kennedy meant to do what he said – remove the missiles one way or another – Khrushchev was quick to see he had to give in. The big secrets of the American half ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... the resurrection of what we think – even wish – safely consigned to the past, becomes the main means by which the novella conducts its ambiguous meditations on how modern Scotland should regard its violent history. The novella has been read by some of Hogg’s critics as a deliberate attempt to undo the decencies of Waverley, as a story intended to restore ...”

“... structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of France shored up a ...”

“... of the college and had left money to fund scholarships for deserving undergraduates of limited means. One of these duly went to his great-grandson. Sterne had reason to think that he was better than his circumstances had made him. After Cambridge, he did what many intelligent young men without money would do, and became a clergyman, eased into modest ...”

“... is dead. There are many distinguished analytic philosophers, particularly admirers of Kripke like David Lewis and Frank Jackson, who are unabashed physicalist metaphysicians. They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against ...”

“... West seemed so excited to find the Arafat era at an end. Peace is not about to break out, if peace means a binding, mutually satisfactory resolution of the ‘final status’ issues in dispute between Israel and the Palestinians: Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty, recognised borders, settlements and water. The reason is simple: the two most powerful Middle ...”

“... her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out in feigned alarm: ‘My lord . . . what means this?’He smiled. As though she did not know! But he enjoyed the masquerade as much as she did. Of late she had perhaps been overeager, and a certain amount of resistance had always appealed to him. So she protested but her heart was not in the ...”

“... in which the imagination is a new saviour at the heart of an aesthetic theology: ‘Poetry is a means of redemption’ or ‘Poetry is a renovation of experience’ or ‘The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.’ The Romantics may have invented this all-powerful sense of the aesthetic, but they invented the distrust of it as well. Keats could ...”

“... Taking​ British Communist art seriously means, to a degree at least, taking British Communism seriously. This is difficult to do when looking at Viscount Hastings’s mural from 1935, The Worker of the Future Clearing Away the Chaos of Capitalism, in what is now the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. The library is a 1960s reconstruction of an 18th-century school, which by the early 20th century housed, among other things, the printing house of Iskra, the newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ...”

“... for, the proper plural of meat being meat. Perhaps meats (on a van: ‘British Premium Meats’) means cooked meats, though meat would still be acceptable there, too. Meats suggests to me something not only cooked but sliced, and already beginning to curl at the edges. Odd that one should have any feelings, let alone care, about such usages.31 January. The ...”