“... Blessed is he whose mind had power to probe/The causes of things,’ Virgil wrote, thinking of Lucretius. But for many, knowing the causal origins of things can be reason for anxiety. Just as we might worry that tracing our family trees will turn up slave owners or madmen, we might also worry that genealogical investigation into our most cherished beliefs, values and practices will reveal what Nietzsche called pudenda origo, a shameful origin ...”

“... sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860). The ...”

“... have been a bid for his patronage. It was not until The Adventures of Eovaai in 1736, in which a power-crazed minister seduces the nation away from civic virtue, that Haywood emerges as an anti-Walpole satirist, and even here the underlying ideology is that of a reformist ‘Patriot’ opposition, not the Tory-Jacobite fringe. She pursued this ...”

“... Dark Vanessa begins in late 2017, as a wave of allegations of sexual harassment against men in power is starting to swell. Vanessa Wye is a 32-year-old concierge at a hotel in Portland, Maine, leading a solitary life of squandered potential and heavy drinking. When the book opens she is compulsively monitoring a Facebook post by a woman called Taylor ...”

“... though thuggish self-advancement is hardly rare. Despite a few halting steps towards devolving power in Britain, England itself remains a profoundly centralised country, in which national politics always dominates. So why not send a national message?Starmer implored voters to ‘choose progress over the politics of anger’. It is a classic Starmer ...”

“... Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of Communists, The Manchurian Candidate is not a properly political film. In it, being a Communist means having ...”

“... disturbed more Victorian readers than any of his peers. We can still register the disconcerting power of Carlyle as an almost Nietzschean anti-moralist; it’s much harder to appreciate why so many found him an inspiringly positive moral guide. Yet for numbers of the earnest young in the 1830s and 1840s, in particular, Carlyle’s writing was a summons to ...”

“... and Thinking, as well as his claim that ‘in the end, philosophy’s business is to safeguard the power of the most elementary words.’ For a nominalist, Heidegger’s favourite words such as physis (Greek for ‘nature’) or Wesen (German for ‘essence’), are no more ‘elementary’ or ‘primordial’ than words such as ‘aubergine’ and ...”

“... than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby got to Labour. The party conference in Liverpool last October was swarming with lobbyists. ‘This is my first Labour conference in years,’ a lobbyist for the energy industry told me at a sponsored drinks reception. ‘There ...”

“... of the DUP founded by the magnificent fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley. Their first child, Jonathan, was born, and Iris was brought low by post-natal depression. She sought relief in her local church, where, one day, she found her faith validated by a lovely coincidence. The speaker told the story of a soldier dying in Galwally hospital, and Iris was ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... and Charles I was slow to follow Bacon’s advice that favourites must be allowed to fall from power to prevent political damage to the king himself – too slow to save his own head. Yet another role for the favourite, or privado, was that of reformer, for the creaking wheels of early modern administration, and especially the financial wheels, cried out ...”

“... the category of homo sacer, brought back into use by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), is more useful here. It designated, in ancient Roman law, someone who could be killed with impunity and whose death had, for the same reason, no sacrificial value. Today, as a term denoting exclusion, it can be seen to apply not only ...”

“... we’re just bluffing.’ What happened in October 2002 is that both Governments, according to Jonathan Pollack, a knowledgable specialist writing in the Naval War College Review, ‘opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes’, and so to unravel ‘close to a decade of painfully crafted diplomatic arrangements designed to prevent full-scale ...”

“... been grateful. In recent times, however, many people have come to regard the United States as a power as dangerous as any other. In reaction to the quietism of the Carter era, American foreign policy has become ultra-activist in both word and deed. This has gone down well with the voters. American public opinion was intensely proud of the successful ...”