“... why anyone’s life, or their pain, matters.This is one problem with Singer’s enterprise. Like Robert Nozick, who starts Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) with a bald statement about the existence and authority of individual rights, Singer premises Animal Liberation Now on the idea that the experiential states of sentient creatures matter in an objective ...”

“... seriously. Harman wonders if ‘possibly [Wooler] was rather tired of having to deal with her young colleague’s hypersensitivity and was trying to encourage her to snap out of it’.Charlotte was desperately unhappy while working as a teacher and as a governess, and wrote in the journal from her time at Roe Head about the comfort she took in entering ...”

“... figure in literary Dublin. For example, in 1980, when Neil Jordan, at that time the most promising young writer in the country, published his first novel, it seemed natural that Stuart would launch the book. In the early 1980s Penguin reissued Black List, Section H. For me and many others who visited the Stuarts in these years, there was a special aura around ...”

“... persist). Defra believes it’s time to arrest the decline of farming capacity. It wants more young people to consider farming as a livelihood and landowners to lease to people who’d like to grow food. Four months before the election campaign, Hilary Benn announced a modest £50 million funding top-up for food and farming R&D over the next five ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election ...”

“... of regional co-operation’. ‘There is a strong feeling in the United States,’ said Robert Gelbard, Clinton’s envoy to the Balkans, who first mooted bombing Yugoslavia, ‘that Milo Đukanović has done an extraordinary job, has been a real hero, in terms of his role in building Montenegro as an independent democratic state, a country that is ...”

“... 1960s in the Pentagon, one of the cerebral ‘whizz kids’ on the staff of the defence secretary Robert McNamara. McNamara was a wonk, confident that no mystery could withstand statistical analysis, and Enthoven was the chief wonk’s wonk, crunching numbers to judge whether the new weapons the generals wanted were worth it. In 1973, Enthoven reinvented ...”

“... the railways. For a minority, the enthusiasts, almost exclusively men (and not, on the whole, young men), the railways are a consuming, fanatical interest. No detail, past or present, is too minor or banal to escape celebration, classification, re-enactment, preservation and restoration. The majority, though, speak of the railways in the utilitarian terms ...”

“... backwardness of the French countryside down to Bloch’s own time.Some fifty years later, Robert Brenner was to develop the kernel of Bloch’s insight into a magisterial comparative analysis of the variant property relations thrown up by class struggles on the land across Europe, and their consequences for the development of agrarian capitalism ...”

“... under Johnson would be any more promising. Unlike the outgoing Defra ministers Michael Gove and Robert Goodwill, Johnson is not seen as an ally to farmers, who fear being squeezed slowly out of the market by the free trade deals he talks up. When negotiating new trade deals with global agricultural producers, notably the US, unrestricted access to the ...”

“... tea before a screening of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. Although there is a minor epidemic of young motorbikers riding around without helmets, Blyth is no longer the place it was in the late 1980s and 1990s, when, as Aiden Campbell put it, the main industry that moved in after coal went was drugs. Day trippers and dog walkers come to the bright expanse of ...”

“... too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was something ...”

“... and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not ...”

“... announced on TV: ‘I’m not saying this, but many people are saying the judges are biased’). Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, was found to have been lobbied by a property developer whom he then helped to avoid millions in tax (the developer followed up with a donation to the Conservative Party), but faced no punishment. Priti Patel, the home ...”