“... that of Arabic philosophy.’ This is an important point, though not exactly new: as early as 1213 Samuel ibn Tibbon, Maimonides’ translator in southern France, pointed out that readers of the Mishneh Torah in Christian lands had been led astray by their ignorance of the Arabic and Islamic context of its vocabulary. But few have learned the Arabic necessary ...”

“... reference (the difference between saying that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and saying that Samuel Clemens did – Clemens was Twain’s real name – where the sense, the cognitive significance, is different but the reference is the same); a great will, too, to separate sentences that were true by definition from those that weren’t, and among those ...”

“... encompassing diverse artists and writers from Lam, Romare Bearden, Bob Kaufman, Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker. ‘Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past,’ Miller writes in his manifesto of 2009. ‘We revisit old ways with new eyes.’ Also in 2009 Robin Kelley ...”

“... and every other late-developing nation was forced to confront – the ‘social question’. Max Weber put it bluntly: how to ‘unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the hard struggles of the future’? Weber was among the conservative German nationalists who saw the social question as a ...”

“... episodes and vignettes. The Age of the Crisis of Man seems at first to be a rich genealogy, like Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia (2010), which describes the way the concept of ‘human rights’, beginning in the 1940s, eclipsed social and economic rights before becoming part of the rhetorical arsenal of freedom-promoters and humanitarian ...”

“... L’Avventura – each associated with a question about whether something new might happen (Samuel Beckett’s Godot and Endgame were still new), shadowed by the question whether love is an exhausted possibility, a question incorporating some residue of a fantasy of marriage. In each case the answer is presented as in the hands of a woman – in ...”

“... included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern world’ were less than 30, although a cheap edition of the Origin pushed its total British sales to 16,000 by the mid-1870s. ‘Considering how stiff a book it ...”

“... incongruities at which my slow-moving mind balks is the combination of two forms of life that Max Weber taught us were immiscible: the symbolic-religious and the calculating-rational. Obviously, those who carried out the attacks on 11 September practised both, and simultaneously. It took painstaking planning, meshed co-ordination of people and objects, and a ...”