“... experience at St Marylebone Grammar School he writes with affectionate good humour (‘I took to examinations like ice-cream’). In the composition of these contrasting scenes, the historian’s intelligence is always at work, setting the accidents of an individual life in the cross-currents of a graphically delineated space and time. The picture ...”

“... about autonomy and the self in ways that virtually discredited them as useful fictions; Rorty took them for granted and promoted them, in, his critics would say, ‘the American way’. It has not escaped anyone’s attention that Rorty’s ‘autonomous self’ committed to liberal democracy and the segregation of private and public lives can sound like ...”

“... who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social ...”

“... into peril? Robinson laughed. ‘In a very simplistic way, yes, I can see that argument … If you took your scenario to the nth degree, shall we say, and looked at the tidal flood risk for the whole of East Anglia, right? Effectively you wouldn’t have anything on it.’Mike Gildersleeves, a senior council planner working across south-east Lincolnshire (aka ...”

“... comes from is required. Born in 1973 in Eindhoven, the company town of Phillips in Brabant, he took history and philosophy at the University of Groningen in the early 1990s. There he joined the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, or VVD, the Dutch variant of a liberal party, and studied under the philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit, a sui ...”

“... At the very least​ we need to ask why it took the fall of Harvey Weinstein to turn the sexual harassment of women into front page news, and whether the endless photo spreads of his female targets weren’t so much designed to provoke outrage or a cry for justice as to grant the voyeur his pleasure. That of course is a pleasure on which the cinema industry thrives and which made these women vulnerable in the first place ...”

“... caught the attention of the world. Three of these were either by-passed or aborted, and the other took a peculiar form, in Brazil. Internationally, the continent became news for the first time in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, when the spectre of guerrilla movements haunted Washington. Brazil was never in the forefront of this turbulence. Compared with ...”

“... 1944 of a Benelux Customs Union. It continued with the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949; took wings with the Schuman Plan of 1950, which gave birth to the European Coal and Steel Community the following year; and expanded with the Treaty of Rome into the Common Market of 1957, creating a European Economic Community which by the end of the 1980s had ...”

“... a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat narratives and it’s fun to fantasise a Margo Channing-Eve Harrington face-off, but Susan Sontag wasn’t the new Mary McCarthy, any more than ...”

“... and provided a shelter for weeds, vermin and insects’. The major drawback, however, was that it took an Osage orange hedge three or four years to grow to its full height.In time the burgeoning rail network would provide the solution. Wood was already being shipped from the East in vast quantities to be used for house building, and the railways themselves ...”

“... Sabra and Shatila is perfectly clear on Israeli responsibility for, and even complicity with, what took place: I refer here to the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk’s powerfully concise and brilliant book, Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un Massacre, which has still found no established British or American publisher. Facts do not at all speak for ...”

“... and will continue to be, inevitable. The first of these topics is guilty pleas. The Commission took the view that there is nothing wrong in principle with encouraging a defendant who has committed the offence with which he or she is charged to plead guilty. The decision should only be taken with legal advice after the prosecution case has been fully ...”

“... And Horace Walpole christened her the Morning Post, after a Private Eye of the time. She took as her second husband the rogue politician Charles Townshend, who seems to have married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the ...”

“... also joined the Fabians, encouraged by Hugh Dalton, the postwar Labour chancellor. He took it seriously, did a lot of reading, especially about the Webbs’ Minority Report on Poor Law reform, and in the summer of 1910, at the end of his year as president of the Cambridge society, he and Dudley Ward toured the West Country in a caravan, speaking ...”

“... eclecticism’ weren’t Europeans, but Orientals; they were the ones who took the fullest intellectual and artistic advantage not only of the advent of Europe but of the fact of the ‘Orient’, the ‘correction’ and ‘expansion’ of ‘the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin’. It’s in this context that I want to situate ...”