“... family have been in prison.’ But he also experienced different ways of thinking. Belfast may not have been at the heart of the summer of love in 1967, and as a practising Catholic Adams didn’t have much in common with progressive contemporaries in London and Dublin, but his early life did at least expose him to Northern Ireland’s Unionist ...”

“... event, the strangling of Hélène Rytmann is a pure contingency, for which motives may be and are found but no one sovereign motive that might resolve and classify the crime as the understandable dénouement of a long and tortured relationship. Between motives and act Althusser preserves that enigmatic gap beloved of the Existentialists of ...”

“... sense’. The notions it deals with – ‘courage’ and ‘compassion’, for example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of ...”

“... the resolutions so badly drafted that there was a tremendous row when it came to settling on 1 May as International Workers’ Day. Yet at the end there was a tremendous cheer for the symbolic handshake between Liebknecht and Edouard Vaillant, representing the unity of the French and German proletariats against militarism and war. Lafargue was one of the ...”

“... individualism to an imperial appetite and the project of continental expansion. Turner’s insight may sound like common sense: once the last frontier has closed, Americans will have to teach themselves how to live, and at just that point the New World will cease to be new. But we have never come to that point, says Fisher. He is pretty sure we never will. And ...”

“... pages, of which only the first 93 have previously been printed. Lawrence wrote the book between May 1920, when he had just finished The Lost Girl, and some time in 1921. He gave up working on Mr Noon in order to dash off the travel book Sea and Sardinia, and was at the same time writing Aaron’s Rod. He had trouble finishing both the novels: Aaron’s Rod ...”

“... from the near town ... And yet this is the poet who quotes with solemn approval: Beauty it may be is the meet of lines, Or careful-spacèd sequences of sound. Well, to be sure: but what happens to ‘the meet of lines’ at ‘wheelbarrow/paths’, and ‘but/out’ and ‘were/barred’? Grigson’s precepts are often admirable, but they are ...”

“... will not wish to appear as the aggressor, and will lie in wait for a suitable provocation. It may even be very cautious in its initial reaction. The Israeli response to provocation need not be an immediate general attack. Israel can respond with a relatively limited action, and wait for the counter-reaction of the other side. Should the terrorist reaction ...”

“... That has such people in’t! Prospero:         ’Tis new to thee. Prospero’s words may or may not be an aside. Immediately after his remark, the other parent and the other child on stage, Alonso and Ferdinand, have 14 lines of dialogue before Prospero speaks to them; Miranda has no more to say in the play. If ...”

“... remains as a symbol that complete disagreement with the Soviet Union has never been reached and may not be possible. The only occasion on which the Soviet Union seems seriously to have considered releasing him was in 1974 when the Bishop of Berlin suggested that he be replaced by an anti-Fascist museum designed and operated by the same four powers who run ...”

“... it in that dawn to be reading Tel Quel and watching the signs that led up to les événements of May ’68. Sollers was among the chief theorists of that ‘moment’, along with Barthes and Derrida. It is not hard to see the connection between these essays and a text like Barthes’s S/Z, where the scientistic dream of a structuralist ‘method’ is ...”

“... the nape of a neck, the exposed back of one hand, and a tentative, slipper-clad foot. Crude they may be, yet without these sisterly gleanings we would know next to nothing of Austen’s face or figure or how she held herself in space: dead at 42 in 1817, she is part of that last, infinitely poignant, generation of human beings who lived and died before ...”

“... since the universe cooled enough to give them free passage. In this neck of the cosmic woods, life may not be all that rare. Rees estimates that even our own galaxy carries millions of Earth-like planets. Admittedly, failure to detect extraterrestrials suggests that most of the planets are ‘Earth-like’ only in offering suitable environments, not in ...”

“... farmers went bust and labourers left the land in droves. Even Adam Smith conceded thathumanity may require that the freedom of trade should be restored only by slow gradations, and with a good deal of reserve and circumspection. Were those high duties and prohibitions taken away all at once, cheaper foreign goods of the same kind might be poured so fast ...”

“... activité, vitesse!’ Similar, too, was Cromwell’s disregard for casualties. Milder historians may argue that the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford during his conquest of Ireland in 1649 were ‘typical casualties of 17th-century warfare’. But even they find it hard to stomach Cromwell’s pious crowing over the Irish, his determination to see his ...”