“... with the concept of dignity. But Waldron has an important argument to make, which applies even more sharply to the ideological pandemonium of the United States than to the relatively civilised conflicts of British politics. He believes that the defining ‘circumstances of politics’ are such as to make the legislature, and not the courts, the appropriate ...”

“... possible circumstance to what one wants to happen universally is not a logical one, for there is more than one way of combining such preferences: simple maximisation of expected satisfaction, counting all the possibilities as equally probable, may not be the right choice even for an individual. But more important, the move ...”

“... down Down with Skool! and cry with laughter’, and he first read it when he was ‘probably no more than ten or eleven’. So I suppose I ought to say at this point that I didn’t read it when I was at school, and reading it now I don’t find it hilarious, though it is sometimes funny. People who did read it at school probably think I’m missing the ...”

“... pulling a Virginia Slim from a cigarette packet, that really left an impression. No man was ever more deliberate, from the way he lit and held that cigarette, and followed it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But the thing I carried away at the end of two ...”

“... the night, and that the sound of a motorway is ‘calming’, a ‘soft rush’ rather than the more predictable roar, is a gloomy prospect. Anna is not unlike Katharine. The narrator of The Love of Stones is at one point even mistaken for a tax inspector. Both women are loners; each has a more conventional sister from ...”

“... and feeding tubes, or ask for terminal sedation. Evidently, the same end could often be achieved more quickly and effectively by a lethal injection, so the value of the patient’s well-being does not draw a ‘bright line’ between assisted death and other measures. If we turn to the value of autonomy, we do find a difference. The currently recognised ...”

“... the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his ...”

“... observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt ...”

“... or other, consciously or otherwise, or taking advantage of an illegality by others. Donald Thomas’s book reminds a reader that had he been a retired colonel living in Brighton in 1942, and invited an actress from London down for the weekend, he could have been smartly fined and threatened with imprisonment next time. The reason? The coastal belt was ...”

“... to live a period of his life over again he might choose this one, the last. For Hume, nothing more needed to be said about waiting for death, a subject that we moderns have turned into a veritable genre. The 19th century brought a few memoirs of invalidism, like Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sickroom, which reports on her five-year-long retreat from ...”

“... The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow ...”

“... Santerre family, Catholic French Canadians displaced to Southern California, and later dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends ...”

“... and fragile’, ‘the Venice of the new millennium’.* New York – or Manhattan, more precisely the subject of Gopnik’s book – has indeed become like Venice, but not because it’s fragile. It is more of a resort city than ever. This transformation occurred despite 9/11 – plans to make Manhattan ...”

“... taking down a shorthand transcript of what is being said, a skill she normally employs in much more exalted circumstances; next week for instance she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only ...”

“... Although Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91, and was one of the most famous philosophers of his day, there are only 211 surviving letters to or from him. This compares with 3656 to or from Locke, some twenty thousand to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them ...”