“... between them) that can be found in thinkers from Isaac Newton and John Locke to Adam Smith and David Hume. What Kind of Creatures Are We? reprints a series of lectures Chomsky delivered at Columbia University, with a lucid foreword by the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami. The second lecture, ‘What Can We Understand?’, opens with an avowal of ‘the new ...”

“... hair and a big beard, and playing the iconoclast in public, not least in an appearance on the David Letterman Show in 1986, where he seemed to be not only dead drunk but crazy. You can find it on YouTube. He died in 2003, at the age of eighty. Phillips was ridiculed throughout his life for selling Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for $40,000, given what ...”

“... Although​ during his lifetime F.T. Prince (1912-2003) acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s possible influences on their early work ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold ...”

“... The most inspiring example can currently be found in human geography. Marxist geographers such as David Harvey emphasise that buildings and land are the products of capitalist elites, while the late Doreen Massey argued that space ‘is always in the process of being made’, by people as much as by capital. She showed how ordinary people could produce their ...”

“... The might-have-been may offer ‘the perfume of the possible’, as it does for Prendergast in David Lean’s film Brief Encounter. This is quite different from what he calls ‘the cheap fragrance splashed all over’ Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, which becomes Prendergast’s shorthand for feckless or footling counterfactual thinking. He doesn’t want ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... if from another universe, Emira heard her voice again.’ The narration could have come from a sci-fi novel: a character being beamed up to a spaceship or having their atoms rearranged. The connection between science fiction and racial otherness, established in the work of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany among others, is glimpsed at here. Bruce Sterling’s ...”

“... satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s account of her life is in tune with the ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... next few weeks, salvage companies attempted to save the ship’s cargo. The British insurers sent David Mockett, a British marine surveyor resident in Aden, to scrutinise the timeline and causes of the explosion. Shortly after Mockett conveyed his suspicion that the ship was the target of insurance fraud, he was killed in Aden by a car bomb.Campbell and ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... North are eco-lodge versions of Kafka’s Committee of Affairs, or the banal halls of the IRS in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King – populated by Systems GuysTM and characterised by morbid bureaucracy. One small gripe is that Beauman doesn’t allow us to spend enough time in any of these places to get a proper sense of them. The most intriguing stop ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”