“... want negotiations with the Taliban. A survey of 423 men in Helmand and Kandahar, carried out in May by the International Council on Security and Development, found that 74 per cent were in favour of negotiations. In Kabul in March, I interviewed several women professionals, the people who suffered most from the Taliban’s restrictions on girls’ education ...”

“... who saw matters in such an evolutionary – and thus, he argued, ethnocentric – light. (This may have had something to do with his experiences as a soixante-huitard.) It became increasingly evident to him that such groups deliberately chose to avoid certain institutions, and remained ‘savage’ by preference (it’s here that one sees the ...”

“... or she might end up being subjected to harmful treatment for a disease she doesn’t yet have, and may never have. In the UK, screening for breast cancer is carried out by mammogram. The breast is compressed between plates and an X-ray image taken. Contrast in X-ray images varies according to the density of the materials photographed; the denser the ...”

“... male fairies, or incubuses, had a reputation for being lovers, rapists, sexual predators. They may have disappeared, but the friars on their perpetual rounds of what we might call ‘chugging’, visiting peasant households while the husbands are out in the fields, have taken on the role of the creatures they exorcised. The joke didn’t need ...”

“... extreme actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... philosopher, and historian of philosophy, of the despised old school. It is clear now, as it may not have been then, that Copleston roundly refutes Ayer’s position, doing so with courtesy, clarity and intellectual discipline. At times Ayer flails wildly, as his astute tormentor drives him from one uninhabitable corner to another – though it is not ...”

“... and that verdict, based as it is on scrupulous argument and an impressive mastery of the subject, may be difficult to upset. Aside from Berlin, the only thinkers to survive Gray’s bombardment without a scratch are Michael Oakeshott and Karl Popper. Gray even pays Oakeshott the compliment of quoting him twice: ‘In political activity, then, men sail a ...”

“... The Thirty-Nine Steps, and as radio listeners they would have tuned into In Town Tonight. It may be so, but then again it may not. The Oxford don may have been delayed at High Table, and the typist may have gone to her trade-union branch. What ...”

“... was never off the agenda. One can go further, however. Historical awareness of the Revolution may not run deep among the mass of Frenchmen, but it often does among the élite, for whom it constitutes an elaborate dramatic metaphor shadowing the practices and institutions of contemporary life. Thus at the height of the ...”

“... in Britain; today, however, it is a flourishing enterprise in the universities. The difficulty may lie in the fact that the new intellectual history has been so intent on reducing the historical and geographical scope within which ideas may be discussed that it simply cannot make out what Berlin is after. Works in this ...”

“... in words as the means, the lovely apparatus, of revelation. One of these, ‘Gooseberry Fool’, may surprise English readers by the fuss the poet kicks up over her discovery of the unexotic fruit, which she ends by promising to incorporate in the dish of the title, but only after having already made a verbal meal of it. Lines like bristling up through ...”

“... Labour Party’s ability to transplant its professed anti-colonialism from opposition to office may note that the Colonial Secretary who signed the Land Apportionment Act was the noted Fabian, Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, who soon thereafter set out with Beatrice to admire the USSR; while the worst uprooting of Rhodesia’s black peasantry (as well as the ...”

“... it ‘easier for the dominators and predators who prosper in a Hobbesian or Sadean world’, one may agree that all these things are as bad as he says, while questioning whether they’re any worse than the intellectual atmosphere revealed by his own bludgeoning style and the vulgar facility of his mental transitions. I wonder, too, whether the connection ...”

“... work. In a long, dedicatory preface he states that his expressed confidence in his own translation may appear arrogant: ‘yet is intended for the honour of my country.’ He attacks the ‘affected purity’ of the French language and asserts that the self-conscious perfectionism of French writers has ‘unsinewed’ their heroic verse. Virgil identifies ...”

“... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...”