“... clowns with sharky grins poking their thumbs at us from screens and hoardings. In Smart City, Donald Trump is a good thing. He makes the faultline visible. The gold-topped King Ubu of the internet has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all the self-serving, reflex mendacity of political operators with a more ...”

“... I wish this was an augury for (or rather against) Brexit. All of us are Remainers which, in the light of her generosity, we feel later that we ought to have said.30 August, Paris. Today a contrary experience. With Rupert at the flea market I walk down the rue de Rennes for my lunch at Deux Magots. Nobody sitting inside, the terrace crowded out. I have a ...”

“... to bring about change.’ Some of Obama’s caution about racial politics makes sense in the light of this, including over the past year, as he engineered the nomination of Joe Biden for president and warned the Democratic Party, particularly its younger wing, against over-committing to the Black Lives Matter agenda. But what about the other side of the ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... who taught her Horace and the Agamemnon and led discussions on suffering and violence, and Donald MacKinnon, whose subjects were theology, moral philosophy, and the dangerous appeal of pain – were of enormous importance to her intellectually (what she studied with them would remain a matter of essential concern in the next several decades of her ...”

“... for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that ...”

“... or an epistemology, or a philosophy of language, which will put the other side in a bad light. To accept the claim that there is no standpoint outside our own particular historically-conditioned and temporary vocabulary by which to judge this vocabulary in respect of rationality or morality is to give up on the idea that we can reach agreement on ...”

“... the idea of direct elections to a consultative body, but in the 1970s Giscard gave it the green light, in exchange for the small states’ conceding a greater role to intergovernmental summitry. The first Europe-wide elections were held in 1979, but the Parliament’s function was still advisory. The MEPs were not lawmakers; their task was to issue a ...”

“... owned the world’. In his epic poem, Genesis, Harry is ‘the great cut-glass chandelier in whose light all objects shone or were dark’. He was a philanderer, which Rose hoped to cure by the simple expedient of making him a father. But her husband had mixed feelings about children and Rose required an operation before she could conceive. She waited until ...”

“... offenders, of whom fewer than half emerged in 1991. The rest died there, deprived of exercise, light, edible food, clean water, clothing and bedding, medical attention and legal representation. They spent their days in unlit concrete cells with steel mesh ceilings. High above the mesh was a roof of corrugated iron. The cells, 2.5 metres by three, were ...”

“... career had been made via the National Salvation Party, of which his brother was a leading light. A year before the coup, Demirel had put him in charge of the stabilisation plan on which the IMF insisted as a condition of bailing Turkey out of its financial crisis – a standard deflationary package that had run into stiff trade-union opposition. When ...”

“... told her, a letter is the photograph of a moment (and a different hour would produce a different light, a different letter), then his early efforts are studio portraits: ‘My room is in cream yellow with bookcases (for review books etc), two chairs and a desk and an armchair, a green carpet (to come) and an electric stove, very high looking down over Woburn ...”

“... may be used to describe a variety of topics. More specifically, I shall be describing the work of Donald Davidson in philosophy of language, and of Nietzsche, Freud and Harold Bloom in moral psychology, as so many manifestations of a willingness to drop the idea of ‘intrinsic nature’, a willingness to face up to the contingency of the language we use. I ...”

“... to the discipline of creative writing, whose ultimate commitment is not to knowledge but to what Donald Barthelme called “Not-Knowing”’. Formed in the shadow of New Criticism, the creative writing discourse still displays ‘not a commitment to ignorance, exactly, but … a commitment to innocence’. This commitment, this sense of writing being ...”

“... sky with the sycamores over the wall still threshing in the wind and the house full of evening light.In contrast the Chelsea Flower Show looks to me like hell on earth, with the main concourse as thronged as Oxford Street. The winning gardens seldom appeal, with the ubiquity of concrete always a problem (though not for the judges). As usual the proceedings ...”