“... Treatise and the Ethics. Contemporary philosophers who invoke Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas in order to strengthen their criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth typically share Nietzsche’s hope. They believe that the institutions and practices their critics see as threatened will in fact be strengthened by ...”

“... vertebrated by a miniature anthology of elegant extracts from ‘our poet-critics’, Dryden to Donald Davie. Both essays substitute bravura appreciations for the comfortable tautologies which padded out Arthur Quiller-Couch’s preface to the first Oxford Book (‘the best is the best’). But in neither does Ricks find time to explain why Derek ...”

“... and at times seems intended to confuse. Washington politics, and in particular the spectre of Donald Trump, loom large.In February, Trump exerted his influence to scupper a bipartisan deal that, among other restrictions, would have enabled the president to ‘shut down’ the border if the number of migrant encounters exceeded certain thresholds. Perhaps ...”

“... grey suit, his hair slicked down 1950s-style, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to the late Donald Pleasence.It took Azar, Donald Trump’s health secretary and a one-time pharmaceutical industry lobbyist and executive, less than three snippy minutes to deliver his boss’s message. The pith was the astounding charge ...”

“... member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism who was given refugee status by the Brazilian justice minister in 2009; that the Italian budget was to be rewritten again, with savings of €6.5 billion; that Chérif Chekatt, the suspected Christmas market terrorist, had been shot dead by police in Strasbourg. Way down the page: May returned from Brussels ...”

“... in Measure for Measure –ISABELLA: Yet show some pity.ANGELO: I show it most of all, when I show justice,For then I pity those I do not know –and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Angelo utters a thought – thought as principle – which is not less serious and searching than are Rawls’s concatenated and elaborated ...”

“... was nothing striking about his features’ (just as it does, incidentally, and with more justice, about Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘features, not in themselves striking’) isn’t going to raise the bar for perspicacity or boldness. Accordingly, the human portraits are not among the best things here: the pages on Vienna, Paris and especially Berlin are ...”

“... for Brussels’. Instead, shamefully, they opted to stand with Poland’s deeply illiberal Law and Justice party when it came under severe criticism in the European Parliament earlier this year (Cameron took the Tories out of the European People’s Party grouping in 2014 and joined an alliance with Poland’s ruling party as well as right-wing populists such ...”

“... without a revolutionary subject’. The environmental movement may have aligned itself with social justice activism, but it hasn’t been ‘able to challenge capitalism with anything like the power once evinced by the Third International or the national liberation movements, or even the social democratic parties of the Second International; a lame ...”

“... Bartlett for what became known as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations – which, if there were any justice in the world, should be known as Isabella Preston’s Familiar Quotations. ‘Bartlett’ in its later editions acknowledged that ‘what is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another,’ and in editions from 1863 stamped the aim of ...”

“... busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the Bond movie ...”

“... office conferred noble status, according to the official explanation, because the king’s justice was royal and therefore should be administered by nobles. The real reason was that the crown sold the offices, and the title was an incentive. Montaigne’s uncle purchased himself a seat in the Bordeaux parlement in 1535, and Pierre Eyquem bought his ...”

“... you, they, are … merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.’ Donald Davie once took Shelley to task for his ‘loose use’ of pronouns, which showed, Davie thought, a lack of discipline and probably suspect moral hygiene; but the tangles of such moments are not really a mark of carelessness, any more than is the ...”

“... of men ride in, unhorse him, burn his wagons and shoot the mules. Stewart in this film, a man of justice in his own eyes, is, instead, to the old rancher Alec Waggoman (gravely played by Donald Crisp), a ‘man I saw in a dream’, the man who will surely ruin his life. He does that involuntarily as his quest proceeds, and ...”

“... in the service of constructing ‘an order of common prosperity and well-being based upon justice’. The obvious comparison is the Warsaw Pact. But to see the two alliances as in any way similar invites the thought that Nato might not be so benign after all. It is sometimes argued that the US was hoodwinked into forming Nato by clever Europeans ...”