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“... It’s striking nowadays to hear a philosopher say that ‘we want a unified account of our knowledge’; even more striking to hear him say ‘I think we can get it’; very striking indeed to hear this from a philosopher of language. That wouldn’t always have been so. A hundred years or so ago, there was great enthusiasm for looking closely at the structure of sentences and at the distinction Frege had drawn between their sense and reference (the difference between saying that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and saying that Samuel Clemens did – Clemens was Twain’s real name – where the sense, the cognitive significance, is different but the reference is the same); a great will, too, to separate sentences that were true by definition from those that weren’t, and among those that weren’t, to admit only those that could be independently verified ...”

“... He​ ‘understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself’, Gilbert Ryle said of the young Bernard Williams, ‘and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your sentence’. Williams’s declared enemies in philosophy – ‘reactionaries’ who sweep everything into a single vision, Kantian ‘progressives’ committed to the view that ethical advance lies in the elaboration of connections between ‘freedom, autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle ...”

“... In Venezuela at the end of June, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Diego Maradona, three heroes of the people in Latin America, kicked off the Copa América. Morales, pleased with his dribbling, kept possession for rather longer than might have been thought polite. When he passed, Chávez, instinctive politician that he is, at once flicked the ball on to the feet of the Hand of God ...”

“... and 16th, of what has come to be called ‘humanist history’. It is an entertaining section: Geoffrey of Monmouth on the achievements of the probably inexistent Arthur (and his spear, called Ron), an account, Burrow observes, which seems so convincing, yet does not convince; the scurrilities of Matthew Paris, not least about Matthew’s own abbey at St ...”

“... In November, Norman Tebbit spoke to the Financial Times of a ‘long revolution’, lasting perhaps twenty years. Nevertheless, he said, ‘when you’ve run through health and education, and had another hard look at the structure of welfare benefits, then it’s difficult to see where the revolution could go on from there.’ Indeed, the Conservatives could then perhaps ‘go back to being the party of saying everything is going reasonably well ...”

“... Ottilie von Goethe recalled a lunch in Weimar in October 1827. Her father-in-law, as usual, had not bothered with the introductions. Silent bows on both sides. During the meal Goethe was comparatively quiet. No doubt so as not to disturb the free speech of his very voluble and logically penetrating guest, who elaborated upon himself in oddly complicated grammatical forms ...”

“... For the past thirty years, New Left Review has been the most consistently interesting political journal in the country. And Perry Anderson, who used to edit it and still helps direct it, has been its consistently most interesting contributor. Like those who wrote for the two papers it replaced, the Communist New Reasoner and, later, Universities and Left Review, the contributors to New Left Review were provoked by the condition of what Tom Nairn called Ukania ...”

“... Fifteen thousand candidates contested 545 seats in the Indian lower house, the Lok Sabha, in the May General Election. Four hundred million of the 590 million who were eligible to do so voted. It was the largest election in history. Yet it might have seemed odd. The Congress Government has been introducing far-reaching reforms. But the economy was not discussed ...”

“... Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board ...”

“... Joseph Schumpeter had a refreshing sense of socialism. For him, it had almost no fixed sense at all. ‘A society may be fully and truly socialist and yet be led by an absolute ruler or be organised in the most democratic of all possible ways; it may be aristocratic or proletarian; it may be a theocracy and hierarchic or atheist and indifferent to religion; it may be much more strictly disciplined than men are in a modern army or completely lacking in discipline; it may be ascetic or eudemonist in spirit; energetic or slack; thinking only of the future or the day; warlike and nationalist or peaceful and internationalist; equalitarian or the opposite; it may have the ethics of lords or the ethics of slaves; its art may be subjective or objective; its forms of life individualistic or standardised ...”

“... In June 1940​ a French lieutenant issued false passes. ‘Sauve qui peut,’ he said. ‘Il faut se débrouiller.’ Get out of this as best you can. Albert Hirschman would say that he’d been a débrouillard all his life. He’d left Berlin in 1933, sought an education in Paris and London, fought in Spain, worked in Trieste, fled back to France, enlisted, and with the rest of his émigré platoon now had to avoid arrest by Vichy ...”

“... There was an occasion on which the ruler of Balkh, in Central Asia, went to make war. Nomads, taking advantage of his absence, seized the city. The inhabitants put up a good fight, for themselves and their ruler, but lost. The ruler returned, despatched the invaders, and upbraided his subjects. War, he told them, was his business: theirs was to pay and obey ...”

“... Athenian navies now chasing each other about the Aegean. It is in this anomalous eighth book that Geoffrey Hawthorn, until his death at the end of last year an emeritus professor of international politics at Cambridge, finds the truest and most revealing aspects of Thucydides’ thought. Here more than elsewhere, ...”

“... Certainly not the saddest for historians, according to Geoffrey Hawthorn’s wonderfully playful and intelligent book: rather, the most instructive. Hawthorn is intrigued by the philosophical standing of counter-factuals – hypothetical ‘other worlds’ – and their usefulness for historians and social scientists ...”

“... be disabling, even if unkind critics carp that this is merely because Volvos don’t run on coal. Geoffrey Hawthorn (LRB, Vol. 6, No 17) seized on ‘the extraordinary fact about Thatcher’, that ‘no one is standing up to her,’ as affording ‘some reason, even if one is not a miner, and even if one accepts the most optimistic view of the supply of ...”