“... existence of moral obligations ‘dictated by reason’. At the end of Shame and Necessity, which may be the best historical study of ethical ideas in recent decades, Williams says that Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel are all on the same side, all believing in one way or another that the universe, or history, or the structure of human reason can, when properly ...”

“... other hand, soldiers who take no prisoners when clearing the survivors out of a bombarded village may have no sense that they are engaged in anything other than a messy military operation, and be quite indifferent to the identity of those they kill. Connecting the genocidal fantasy with the murderous reality is tricky. Genocide is a big-picture, ‘vision ...”

“... world of the arts, where supply is eternally in excess of demand, and one finds shelter where one may. Nor am I recommending any variety of Noble Savagery or Doing-your-own-thing. The latter is a contemporary phenomenon worth noting as one of several factors in the weakening of poetry as a public affair. A lot of interest is shown in poetry today, compared ...”

“... Justice Benjamin, now in the role of acting chief justice, refused to stand down. What Europeans may find remarkable is not only that it was by a single vote that the US Supreme Court eventually struck down the West Virginia decision for apparent bias, but that it was the four judicial conservatives, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who voted to uphold the ...”

“... escape from longing; her slight qualification – ‘without hope, without hope of return’ – may imply that, even in glorious isolation, certain hopes persist. And besides, what is being relished here is the contemplation of such a fate, not necessarily the fate itself. Delicious, no doubt, but only when one is in the mood. In The Voyage of the Dawn ...”

“... hauled away to be sifted for treasure. The damage to the regime’s standing was enormous, as may be judged by a contemporary witness. Seneca the Younger, an insider at Nero’s court, was writing prolifically in the year the fire took place, producing the Moral Epistles and the less well-known Natural Questions, a philosophical meditation on natural ...”

“... proportions as to hinder the emergence of detailed accounts about what really happened. Someth May and Molyda Szymusiak (this is her adopted name) are two Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge years and eventually gained refuge in the West. Someth May’s close collaboration with James Fenton on his book was the ...”

“... ways and a ‘thrust for individual identity’ in the technological modern world. The Profile may have enlivened what I took to be a rather anaemic response to the film since it was first shown in cinemas in this country. My impression is that cinéastes shrank from it as from some sort of solid up-market soap opera, and that in being seen as unduly ...”

“... however, might find Roy’s analysis reassuring. Intense though their beliefs and actions may appear, the Islamists are very like the rest of us: they want to develop as individuals in a global world, they respond to many of the same secular pressures (even if they reject aspects of them), and in time they might even be persuaded to accept the ...”

“... of the Stalin phenomenon, as has been officially maintained. All this strongly suggests that 1987 may see the beginning of a full-scale re-examination of Soviet history. Glasnost has made the task of analysing Soviet society both more rewarding and more difficult. Not only is there a vastly wider range of information for the journalist or academic specialist ...”

“... to bed with – a married man, a friend’s man or, quite simply, a man who wasn’t her man. It may be that some of them allowed themselves to be talked into it and afterwards wished they hadn’t and it may be that someone (usually someone else) suffered for it, but to call these events ‘seductions’ would be to try ...”

“... with apparently quite different properties are found to be related to each other and indeed may be transformed into each other under certain circumstances. For this method of unification to work, we need to identify symmetries in the interactions represented by (often hidden) similarities in the laws of physics. A simple example: if a physical ...”

“... of imperialism, this approach becomes awkward in an age (if, of course, we have got there) which may wish to read about ‘them’ in terms other than those of Eurocentric romance. There are signs, however, that this may be changing, if the case of Mau Mau, Kenya’s anti-colonial rebellion of the Fifties, is anything to ...”

“... There is an odd experience that Plato may have had. If light filters into a room through a small enough aperture, anything moving on the street outside will cast its shadow on the ceiling and back wall, and the shadow may have only the most abstract resemblance to the original. Perhaps the human predicament is really like that ...”

“... Another ‘myth’ is that evolution has been ‘progressive’. This idea may have been inherited, as the authors suggest, from the Victorian concept of social evolution: but surely it is now possible to agree that in the 3000 million years of evolution from the earliest known bacteria to mammals and flowering plants there has been a ...”