“... combinations of words in sentences capable of expressing thoughts. This initial characterisation may rightly be felt to do extremely rough justice to the conception Harris wishes to criticise, in two respects. First, it is tendentiously entitled a ‘myth’, and its two components ‘fallacies’, before any attempt has been made to show-that it is in any ...”

“... a rebuttable presumption in favour of any method of procuring organs for transplant. The rebuttal may take the form of an argument against a particular method: against, for example, the suggestion that we should randomly kidnap people off the street to harvest their organs. But the burden of proof lies on the opponents to find some such argument; if those ...”

“... experience. The future is something which we fear, even if it does still titillate the ear. This may reflect an imaginative paralysis of our causal understanding or it may reflect simply an improvement in our intellectual judgment. (It is hard soberly to imagine a human future at any point in time which did not offer some ...”

“... grave.) For those who see Wittgenstein as the creator of a great new direction in philosophy it may come as a shock to learn that he did not regard himself as an original thinker. In 1931 he wrote: I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightaway seized on it with ...”

“... the uncontainable. He is the politician who has turned tenacity into an art form. Where others may weary, falter and even stumble, he persists. Successive prime ministers, including those on his own side of the party divide, have flinched at the sight of his form rising from Westminster’s back benches. While no premier would choose to see himself as ...”

“... best novel yet. Certainly it is his most ingenious. But this familiar way of putting things may contain a mistake, a mistake which is part of the subject-matter of Roth’s book. ‘Best novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The ...”

“... of ordinary language developed by the Oxford School of Philosophers’ – especially, one may add, by John Austin. Unfortunately Dr Harré finds it necessary to develop his thesis by the use of language that is very far from ordinary. Those who are not familiar with the jargons of philosophy and sociology will find it hard to follow. Nevertheless, for ...”

“... the novel, the dominant literary form of the modern age.’ If we consider these claims, we may agree that Harrington’s influence was a consequence of the experience of 1640-60, for his work, like the writings of Filmer and Hobbes, was a response to the crises of that time, though it would not have been what it was had he not also drawn so fully on ...”

“... presented, often without the storyteller or audience being fully aware of the process. The result may be that the narrative diverts attention from the substance of what we are being told: we need to be careful not to confuse the forms of verisimilitude with the insights we are apparently being given. Now in his mid-thirties, Jason Burke has reported for the ...”

“... refuted the conclusion of the argument from design, without challenging its premises. Nature may be well designed, much as Darwin’s creationist predecessors thought, but good design doesn’t require a designer. Thus John Maynard Smith once defined biological adaptations as the sorts of trait that natural theologians would have mistaken as evidence for ...”

“... be repeated uncritically for the next forty years. But he sounded a note of caution even so. These may have seemed like persuasive arguments for capitalism at a time when Europe was riven by pointless dynastic wars. But when the ‘reality of capitalist development was in full view’, the idea that ‘men pursuing their interests would be forever ...”

“... On Level Three, judges review the actions of ministers and other public authorities and may invalidate those actions on the ground that they are not authorised by statute or are procedurally defective. Such review may control the way ministerial powers are used and may disallow ...”

“... men of solidly commercial good sense. They must have thought the claim absurd in so far as they may have noticed it, and after them the colonial decades soon thoroughly established history in equatorial Africa as having begun, in any sense to be taken seriously, with the advent of Christianity as well as Commerce during the 1840s. Save to a few ...”

“... have changed. What they write can be challenged by facts. A new X-ray or a contemporary inventory may destroy the argument a group of paintings was chosen to illustrate. Critics, by contrast, invent categories which facts cannot invalidate. For example, Kenneth Clark’s distinction between the naked and the nude stands as long as we agree that pictures of ...”

“... are as much at home in Jane Austen’s dressing-room as are Dostoevsky and Scott Fitzgerald. This may be all to the good, though it leads him to such remarks as that Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘gay resilience in a society tending always towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many English ...”