“... idea is simple, however, and it’s one on which Johnston finds ‘massive consensus, across the major religions’, which harbour correct ethical ideas in spite of their endemic idolatry. Acquiring a good will is a matter of anatta as above – complete dissolution of the selfish local self. A good will is ‘a disposition to absorb the legitimate interests ...”

“... this ‘love of the limelight’, but there is surely more to it than that. A man I once met, a major donor to the Democratic Party, told me of being invited to have dinner with Bill Clinton at the White House, where he and his wife also stayed the night. He was amazingly taken with Clinton, astounded by his warmth and intellect, and flattered by his ...”

“... weren’t necessarily full-time or jobs for the duration of the project), but only a few of the major contracts have gone to British firms. Tunnelling contracts have been awarded to the UK’s BAM Nuttall, Balfour Beatty and Kier Group, but also to Ireland’s John Sisk & Son, Austria’s Alpine BeMo and the Spanish firms ...”

“... a passport to a conference in Paris, or of befriending a Western foreigner, was to visit a certain Major Kowalski now and then and invent some harmless platitudes – cheap at that price. A few of my friends admitted this and joked about it. Others kept it delicately unsaid. They were reluctant informers, not professional spooks out to entrap me, and knowing ...”

“... It’s hard to miss the teleology in this part of the story: the artist as a young man absorbs his major influences – Shanghai, London, psychoanalysis, Surrealism – and all he needs now is a form that will enable him to channel them into his writing. Tiring of the ‘grey and overcrowded’ capital, he signed up for a short service commission in the ...”

“... in his Swiss château, to Colonel Friedman, on secondment from the US artillery, to recruits like Major Walters, not yet a staff officer treading the backstairs of 10 Downing Street, as well as a phalanx of fresh-faced subalterns, all set on loading the shells into the breech to fire off in the next IEA bombardment. Their order of the day is worth quoting at ...”

“... to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel about the nuclear family in the age of nuclear jitters, took this approach about as far as it could go. As its cover suggests, The Black Veil finds Moody reaching past his immediate literary fathers to his anguished ...”

“... herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better ...”

“... E-flattish atonality of the Suite is laughed off by Stravinsky’s unabashed key of A minor-major. The music bursts out like water from a broken main.’ Stravinsky’s use of serialism became increasingly rigorous, but even at its strictest, as in the choral-orchestral Threni of 1958 (another Venice premiere), he never sounds like Schoenberg. The ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... in ideas and traducing their concepts in the process. By 1983, the centenary of the birth of both John Maynard Keynes (died 1946) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (died 1950), it was the less dirigiste Schumpeter, so economists were saying, who spoke to the needs of the hour. The Age of Keynes thus gave way to the Age of Schumpeter, as can be confirmed by ...”

“... the preserves of serious fiction’, is clarifying.He quotes a disparaging review by John Updike of the English translation of Abdel Rahman Munif’s Mudun al Malh, or Cities of Salt (in his own review, Ghosh called it a ‘work of immense significance’; here, as throughout the book, his shift of focus away from the West is both salutary and ...”

“... respect from the prominent British child analysts Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Questions were asked about the significance of the father in child development, and family therapy opened up the family as a system rather than a cult of personality. At the same time we were encouraged to believe that everything depended on what the ...”

“... by her appeal as a Dorothy Doolittle and queer icon. Her paintings languish in the reserves of major museums, while in Paris her name mostly evokes the euphoric gay club in Buttes-Chaumont park. Bonheur’s vast body of work is surprisingly various, both in medium and subject (some of her landscapes without animals are exceptional). Being so commercially ...”

“... expected to be strictly apolitical; the independence of the judiciary is considered sacrosanct. John Rawls went to extraordinary lengths to imagine an ‘original position’ in which everyone would be capable of agreeing on the principles of social justice: in it, each of us would be ignorant of our own social status and effectively function as an outside ...”