“... the commands of a God who is moral ruler of the world’. Lilla speculates that Kant may not have fully appreciated the opening he created for a Christian politics. After all, his concrete proposals for diminishing the violence caused by religious-political alliances were almost identical to Locke’s: ‘greater church-state separation, an end ...”

“... it was almost always necessary to have led troops in combat; but he suspects that personal factors may also have played a part. Austin was unfailingly courteous and supportive to those inferior to him, but prickly and often rude to superiors. Once, with Eisenhower present, in response to an American lieutenant general who expressed doubt during one of his ...”

“... of science is winners’ history. The last proponents of geocentric astronomy or phlogiston may no longer be dismissed as irrational or pigheaded, but their evidence and arguments receive considerably less attention from academics than those of their ultimately successful opponents. And almost no one suggests that the likes of Tycho Brahe or Joseph ...”

“... and Raleigh, North Carolina. But Greenwood did have a solid middle class. The neighbourhood may have been separate and unequal, but it was proudly Black-controlled.The tragic events of 1921 began with a minor encounter between two teenagers that, in a normal country, would hardly have become a catalyst for violence. Dick Rowland, a Black 19-year-old who ...”

“... the young Wordsworth exulted, to recapture Schiller’s conviction that art and politics together may jointly shape a new humanity, we need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most ...”

“... or amiculture, like much of his other material, presumably refers back to the critical corpus. It may be that Quentin Oates had a point when he reflected in his State of Reviewing Address at the end of last year that ‘the Spectator, in its book reviews at any rate, seems to be going downhill.’ But it has to be said that Peter Ackroyd, formerly its ...”

“... their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be coming home. ‘How do you do, I cannot talk to you ...”

“... war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen, but we are as confused as we were in 1938 over what form it will take and what to do about it. Our response so far is just like that before the Second World War, an attempt to appease. The Kyoto agreement was uncannily like that of Munich, with ...”

“... he listed. It was something so all-pervasive in his work, both the essays and the fiction, that he may not have even noticed it, although he was alert to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special ...”

“... A snake, if a man’s spittle Falls upon it, will wriggle And writhe in frenzied contortions, and may even gnaw Itself to death; and there are certain Trees, should you ever drift off to sleep In their shade, you’d wake clutching your throbbing head as if an axe Had been buried there. The blossom, I’ve heard, of a type of rowan That flourishes in the ...”

“... and canyons, down to the picture of this very day, fresh as a haircut, puzzles minds. The year may not remember the hurt, but the hurt does, hidden among lobes of the augur plant or phrasing in the sky. Blown off course, but the course remains, faded watermark, shadow of all resilience, to be found once summer has ended, a random sarcophagus viewed from ...”

“... To the pigeons crowding around him in the park, Could they be the same person? The blind woman who may know the answer recalls Seeing a ship as big as a city block All lit up in the night sail past their kitchen window On its way to the dark and stormy Atlantic. All Gone into the Dark Where’s the blind old street preacher led by a little boy Who said the ...”

“... calceolarias, sure to come back breathless … It’s all set up. Strangers at a concession may find they missed the onion maze phase of the celebrity mash-up. The open system showing its age, they ...”

“... life overlooking the Camley Street Nature Reserve. In 1974, in their original spot, the gasometers may have been taken to represent work-to-rule Britain. Or perhaps that’s how we like to think of them now. Others saw them differently, nostalgically, a bit of the North in a place where the train from the actual North met its final stop. The building facing ...”

“... Last Poemi.m. Derek MahonWe value them, the voicesthat need us least, who speakwith honest subtletyto ironies beyond us,who slip our grasp and gowhistling down endlesscelestial colonnadesof – no, not astral planeswhere the dream-soul wanders,but airport corridors,bus stations, the Gare du Nord,a beach house in Goa,testing posteritywith promises to break ...”