“... argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide between them, owes almost everything to John Rawls. Barry, certainly, has no doubt: Rawls is simply ‘the greatest political philosopher of the century’. But Rawls’s qualities, as Barry describes them, his sense of the range of considerations, his subtlety, his sheer fertility, together with his ...”

“... impatience with Romantic antiquarianism can be sensed in the Short History when he comments on John Montague’s poem about a group of old country neighbours: ‘Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.’ These old people, who inspire mixed feelings of tenderness and repugnance, are compared by the poet to a ‘standing circle of stones’. For ...”

“... they may all be opposed to racism, but they have different ideas about how to overcome it. Joe Williams, a black councillor in Reading who has been a forthright campaigner for racial equality for many years, recently opposed a council proposal to spend money on racism-awareness training. There was some bewilderment among white councillors. How could a ...”

“... There’s​ a very short story by Diane Williams which came into my mind while I was reading Machines like Me, Ian McEwan’s 15th novel. It’s called ‘Machinery’ and it’s 104 words long. It ends: ‘For some idea of the full range of tools at his disposal, one would have to know what human longings are all about, a calm voice says calmly ...”

“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”

“... England is determinedly – interminably – drab: a land of supermarket cheese counters and John Lewis carrier bags, rendered in meat-and-potatoes prose with neither eye nor time for beauty.Nowhere drabber than in A Helping Hand, which mostly takes place in a ‘featureless’ London suburb:The land that stretched around them was as featureless as ...”

“... plucking at my weedish bouquetwe love niggas we love niggas notWhat the poet Phillip B. Williams has recently called the ‘seductive tokenism’ of the US poetry scene is here likened to the game effeuiller la marguerite (‘She loves me, she loves me not’). In Smith’s account, it is arbitrary which Black writers are published and which are ...”

“... it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might ...”

“... spokes in a wheel. Edinburgh had been school trips to Murrayfield to see Haydn Tanner and Bleddyn Williams outclassing Scotland in the Forties – hundreds of hours in the Fifties copying from manuscripts in the National Library – brief trips ever since to visit a son who worked there for a time and a Henry Moore who is still there, leaning calmly on one ...”

“... certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ancient, agonising, irrational test ...”

“... with the female lead is offset only by his boundless greed; a blind judge, the famous Sir John Fielding, who is widely believed to have been deceived by the enchanting villainess, despite his legendary reputation for discerning innocence or guilt in the voices of defendants; a rich and gullible Jewish sugar-daddy who attracts hints of anti-semitism; a ...”

“... inherited the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh ...”

“... his arm, bound for a night in the Riviera villa of, say, Vic Damone – or would it have been Andy Williams? Things have changed, I know, and Elton John is now a sort of minor Royal, but still . . . Something sufficiently Alf-like squats in Glenn, we’re led to feel. He likes to come across as icily on top of things but ...”

“... been debated for decades whether Wilson resigned on this matter, along with Aneurin Bevan and John Freeman, because of the principle of National Health, or because of the more ancient principle of reculer pour mieux sauter. And it’s hard to blur this choice, but Ziegler has a clumsy try at the task. Prescription charges, on the one hand, Gaitskell’s ...”

“... The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort of readership that Heaney and ...”