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“... to limitless wealth and resources, technology promises not only observation, but the novelist’s powers of arrangement and retroactive shaping. Lemoine’s drones cast a roving eye over spaces and individuals from above. (‘You hold the figures in your hand,’ he tells Mira of his love of flying. ‘You can see the whole scene.’) His phone-hacking ...”

“... to be rid of something universally regarded as real and of this world. Belief in its therapeutic powers did not depend on blood’s supposedly magic or symbolic qualities but on its real life-giving force. When, in the 1750s, the people of Paris rioted because Louis XV’s henchmen were supposedly kidnapping children in order to cure his morally corrupt, and ...”

“... meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of interfering with police inquiries. As political players grow old, they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have said or not said. Five years later ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”

“... on the lab tests that the defeat devices were designed to defeat; for another, their enforcement powers were next to non-existent. Why? See above: Germany is Europe’s most powerful country, car manufacture is Germany’s most powerful industry. The worst that could happen, in the unlikely event that Volkswagen was caught, was a slap on the wrist and a ...”

“... decision for apparent bias, but that it was the four judicial conservatives, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who voted to uphold the judgment. They may also now know that, thanks to a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, Massey need no longer channel its subventions through its chairman: it can donate to judicial re-election campaigns corporately and ...”

“... she jumped out of a fourth-floor window. Her intention was either to die or to display her magical powers, depending on how delusional one thinks she was. Graves jumped after her from a lower window. Both survived – and Riding, despite broken vertebrae, was able to walk again through the intervention of a back surgeon called Mr Lake. Riding (never one to ...”

“... all this controversy, who in his Free Enquiry of 1749 had questioned the extension of miraculous powers into the second century on grounds which left it doubtful whether he believed they had existed in the days of the apostles. The real issue is latent here: Gibbon’s critics wanted him to concede – and thought he had not conceded – that the spread of ...”

“... Mind (1952), through The Artist’s Journey into the Interior (1965) and the studies of Thomas Mann (1958) and Kafka (1974), to the reviews, essays and lectures now collected as In the Age of Prose, his task has been to make the major achievements of 19th and 20th-century German culture understandable by a British and North American readership. He ...”

“... Humble Petition and Advice of 1657 attempted to modify but not to cripple the Protector’s powers), purported to divide supreme power between the Protector and ‘the people assembled in Parliament’, but in reality there was an unmistakable bias against ‘overmighty’ Parliaments, such as the Rump which had just been sent packing. The Protector had ...”

“... a phony. Taylor, we’re told, also stole Johnson’s idea that the decisive moment for the Axis powers was Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US: Johnson had confided it to Taylor over supper in hall. Over another supper six months later, he served it up to Johnson as though it was a novel notion; and then he stuck it in a book without ...”

“... They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against Heidegger. These philosophers still award a special ontological status (‘fundamental reality’) to the elementary particles discovered by the physicists. They believe ...”

“... the top, tells of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and President Johnson’s request for war-making powers in Indo-China. The second headline, also right across the page in what must have been a tough day for sub-editors, reports the FBI’s discovery of three corpses, believed to be of three missing civil-rights workers, in a swamp in Mississippi. For me, and ...”

“... often you read them; it remains the incantation of a murderer, dishevelled and fumbling among the powers of darkness.It is an act of alert critical reading to spot the action word among the proliferating concepts; and generous to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ...”

“... first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas Davies, who described ‘his aweful approach … somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes.”’ ‘Remember me’ was Boswell’s mandate from ...”