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“... his early forties, hadn’t been thought to be living up to his early promise. Sartre, Camus and Raymond Aron had praised his first book, a novel about Polish partisans, A European Education (1945), but he had later lost his audience, producing – among other things – an eccentric satire on racism and a Parisian rewrite of Oliver Twist. The initial ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin exaggerated Polanyi’s stature as a scientist when he evidently said to Raymond Aron: ‘These Hungarians are strange … Here is a great scientist giving up the Nobel to write mediocre works of philosophy.’ Nye describes Personal Knowledge as ‘a dense and difficult book’. She is being charitable; for many readers, it has ...”

“... though he was pushing fifty by the time it saw the light of day in French. His thesis supervisor, Raymond Aron, described its style as ‘Proustian’, but as one slogs through its five hundred-odd pages (merely a stump of the French original), that verdict comes to seem increasingly hard on Proust. As with Thucydides and Habermas in English, the ...”

“... and protectionist in its economic; and its footprint was light in Asia and Africa, where, as even Raymond Aron conceded, the natives did not need to read or even understand Lenin, or have to deal with a repressive imperial police state, to identify Europe with imperialism. There was enough evidence for it in everyday life and memory: ‘the exploitation ...”

“... of artists. His great-grandfather was a violinist who performed for Napoléon III; his father, Raymond, a portrait painter. Lévi-Strauss père barely made ends meet, but he saved up to take his only child to see the Ring Cycle and Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Claude drew, painted, took photographs, even wrote a trio for two violins and piano. His maternal ...”

“... were, one suspects, undertaken largely to amuse himself and because he knew it teased. As Raymond Aron, that superbly disenchanted observer, remarked, ‘de Gaulle does not himself take seriously half the arguments he uses, and he takes a solitary pleasure in the spectacle of the polemics he unleashes.’ At times, his cynicism was ...”

“... for it will leave no ruins behind and no wave of barbarism will ensue. Reflecting on this fantasy, Raymond Aron gently and wisely remarked that Marx was apparently unable to distinguish between the desirable and the likely. The Manifesto’s philosophy of history denies the Law of the Conservation of Trouble, assuming that fundamental problems can be ...”

“... a five-page polemic against the spirit of our age: Jean-Paul Sartre – for or against? Raymond Aron – for or against? … Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas … seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution … all become little bourgeois capitalist pleasure ...”

“... worldly-wise Duke de Richleau, a monarchist exile from France, and his young friends Simon Aron, a brilliant Jewish banker, Rex Van Ryn, a brash, genial American multimillionaire, and the comparatively colourless Englishman Richard Eaton, supposedly a self-portrait. The plot (a hunt for tsarist treasure, a Bolshevik scheme for world domination – plus ...”

“... a journal, Les Temps modernes (named for the Chaplin movie), with Michel Leiris, Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron on the editorial committee, and she went to the Ministry of Information to beg for a quota of paper. The Blood of Others came out, the first issues of Les Temps modernes were published, her play, Les Bouches inutiles, was put on, and her stock ...”

“... blandishments of political power, tell the same story, less gloriously. ‘We have Orwell. We have Raymond Aron’: the one supplying officialdom with a secret list of suspect acquaintances, the other keeping silent about the Algerian War for years, not to displease his employers at Le Figaro. To seek to insulate intellectuals, even such cynosures, from ...”

“... heard. Professor Jacob Talmon’s writings have been praised by the Times itself, and Professor Raymond Aron has been honoured as if he were a jazz-age Montesquieu, looking admiringly across the Channel from Paris.One pauses to note that Commentary was once a critical magazine. Anyway, Birnbaum sent the essay up to Headington House, in draft form, in a ...”

“... that set in from the mid-1970s onwards produced no political thinkers to compare even with Aron. But what it lacked in original ideas, it more than made up for in organisational reach. The phrase la pensée unique, coined twenty years later – though like all such terms, involving an element of exaggeration – was not inaccurate as a gauge of its ...”