“... followed. To feed and house the uninvited newcomers halfway decently, and find them jobs in new light industries was a splendid achievement; but it brought the risk that, if open politics were permitted, Hong Kong would split ungovernably along Chinese civil war lines, with one side’s backers holding the tap on Hong Kong’s daily water supply. Two ...”

“... thought since the war. There he quickly found a local mentor in Marcel Gauchet, a leading light of the anti-totalitarian galaxy of the 1980s who by that time had become a critic of the promotion of human rights to a central position in democratic thought. In 1999 van Middelaar published the result of his labours in the Netherlands, Politicide: De ...”

“... when ‘the Movement’ was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as ...”

“... he said, ‘I also knew that I was setting aside, perhaps forever, a strong desire to travel light and see the world.’ In truth none of his three marriages, or the three children and three stepchildren that came along with them, would stop him seeing the world, and for most of the time between his high school years and his death from leukaemia in 2014 ...”

“... while the commercial stations did the real job of entertaining with their serials, dance bands, light classics and jazz. Johnson writes from a worked-out position, clearly anti-élitist and feminist: she analyses commercial radio in terms of its ideological placement of the audience as family members, and of women as family-bound. But with all that can be ...”

“... the Western world’s practice on crucial issues such as internet control and supervision.’ Donald Trump? The People’s Daily again, via Twitter this time: ‘@realdonaldtrump is right. #fakenews is the enemy. China has known this for years.’ Tiananmen was a disaster for China, no? Au contraire: in Griffiths’s words, ‘it was argued, even by those ...”

“... disclosure of a conflict of interest, he is a mere member – of the Defense Policy Board under Donald Rumsfeld. Another member of the study group was Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Policy. The advice that Perle, Feith and other American friends of Israel’s Likud irredentists gave Netanyahu in 1996 became the Bush ...”

“... The Autobiography found the mooted authenticity of a voice that felt like a brass-neck steal from Donald Goines’s Dopefiend or Iceberg Slim’s Trick Baby to be, at best, a balefully corny performance. On a deeper level, though, that voice hints at all sorts of unresolved tensions and uncomfortable truths about jazz and its place in postwar American ...”

“... 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 ...”