“... left to the imagination about what could happen if a mistake on the order of 1914 were made again. John Kennedy read The Guns of August as a parable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as ...”

“... condemnation by the League for its actions in Ethiopia. On resigning his post in 1937, Pilotti took part in the celebrations in Genoa of the conquest of Ethiopia; and during the Second World War headed the high court of occupied Ljubljana after Italy’s annexation of Slovenia, where resistance was met with mass deportations, concentration camps, and ...”

“... that Controversy was make or break. In the end, swayed by his hypo-sharp management team, Prince took the gig. It didn’t go well. On the first night, 9 October, Prince and his band, the Revolution, barely made it through four songs before getting booed offstage. (Accounts differ, some of them wildly, but it seems to have been one track in ...”

“... reporting and persuading were, for him, seamlessly joined creative acts. He liked writing and took enormous pains in composition; he cared deeply about its power and effects on readers. Whatever might be meant by the ‘essence’ of evolution by natural selection is something you could say was discovered: the text called the Origin was composed, in ...”

“... The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been ...”

“... or representing reality (of ‘mind as the mirror of nature’) was not the sublime necessity they took it to be, but only an unfortunate historical accident – a pointless verbal widget dreamed up by a lazy but ambitious French scientist called Descartes some time in the 1630s. The only people to profit from Descartes’s concept of mind, according to ...”

“... of a number of recent books by Andreas Malm, opens by quoting an observation made in the LRB by John Lanchester (22 March 2007) that terrorism had thus far been markedly absent from the climate movement.* That might have been a sign of the times. There was little appetite in the years after 2001 for discussion of the merits of terrorism. Even if the ...”

“... greeted with scepticism by most traditional psychiatrists, a new discipline – victimology – took up the cause. A play on ‘criminology’, it sounds like a joke in English and has the same semi-serious ring in French. But in 1995 it gained semi-official recognition when Jacques Chirac, responding to that year’s terrorist attacks, came up with the ...”

“... 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 ...”