“... and ‘absolute’ is badly suited to describe the relation between the old and the new. Donald Davidson has pointed out that once we give up on the notion of ‘absolute criteria of rationality’, and begin using ‘rational’ to mean something like ‘internal coherence’, then, if we do not limit the range of this term’s application, we shall ...”

“... that responded early, such as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, Johnson boasted ...”

“... had destroyed Israel. Mr Rafi’i came back, carrying two glasses of water. ‘What happened to justice?’ I asked. ‘What justice?’ ‘The just society you were fighting to create.’ He smiled: ‘If you pursue God, you generate a perfume; you must have heard this. Do you smell it now in Iran?’ I ...”

“... feel the same; old women love Johnny Cash; and young men love him too. Even Nick Tosches – the Donald Davie of rock criticism – likes him, at least a little bit. Walk the Line is probably the only film that both I and my wife, my mother-in-law, my sister, my son, and the entire population of Camden Town and Middle America have all been united in wanting ...”

“... mid-1950s against anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of rock’. How far this prudishness in the public culture was mirrored in private life is hard to gauge, but Kynaston presents enough evidence ...”

“... in placing Unitarianism within a wider tradition of dissenting Christianity; but in truth, as Donald Davie robustly maintained in A Gathered Church (1978), it hardly does justice to the enormous heterodoxy of Unitarianism to think of it as a form of Christianity at all. Certainly Coleridge came to think in that ...”

“... affairs,’ Richelieu declared at the dawn of the modern state system, ‘the administration of justice requires authentic proofs; but it is not the same in affairs of state . . . There, urgent conjecture must sometimes take the place of proof; the loss of the particular is not comparable with the salvation of the state.’ As we ascend the ladder of ...”

“... at last bring a discussion of its calamitous role into the open in the US. With the exception of Donald Rumsfeld, who conveniently did his military service in the gap between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither Bush nor any of the other prime movers of this war served in the military. Of course, General Colin Powell served in Vietnam, but he is well known ...”

“... wars, of which this is the third volume.* Woodward is not only granted audiences: he interviews Donald Rumsfeld, and others, at his home, in his own kitchen, over supper. If you’re Nigella-ish, you’ll be disappointed by his non-disclosure of what there was to eat.This hasn’t always been so. Woodward’s first Watergate article wasn’t about the ...”

“... stairs. An extreme example, admittedly, but Auden’s work is often unsure about the prospects of justice, poetic or otherwise. In ‘Spain 1937’ and ‘September 1, 1939’, talk of ‘the Just City’ or of a realm that exists ‘wherever the Just/Exchange their messages’ doesn’t ring true, not least because of the capital letters.Auden​ always ...”

“... Modernists whose reputations are now rightly in rapid decline.’Such an estimate may do justice to the scale of Browning’s work. Whether it comes to terms with Browning’s actual identity as a poet is much more doubtful: for Browning’s authenticity, which is really the only thing that matters in a poet, depends, I think, on his being in fact ...”

“... completion) services.Today the union that Thatcher did so much to shape is light on social justice, tough on treasury borrowing, fixated by opening up markets to competition. If it weren’t for the electorate’s concerns over immigration, the Tory Brexiteers would look as though they were stuck in a time warp. After all, the EU long ago addressed ...”

“... a first draft of The Idiot in the early 2000s, publishing it only in 2017 – by which point Donald Trump, a familiar figure from my youth, was somehow in charge of the United States, and Roe was under serious threat, and I, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, was going around the country promoting a ‘debut novel’ about a painful crush I had had when ...”

“... Dame Lucy explains in one of her many splendid contributions, the great Oxford legal scholar and justice, William Blackstone, found ways of circumventing the legal and political restrictions, so that reforms in the Vice-Chancellor’s court, in the programme of legal studies, and in the University Press, were possible. The History is structured around ...”

“... had imagined a new England arising. Its values included a longstanding commitment to freedom and justice, a libertarian tradition of civilian courage rather than imperial state power, Hogarthian sincerity and an uncompromising contempt for aristocratic affectation. As the war ended, Goldring imagined this inspiration to be ‘retained shyly like a secret in ...”