“... and opportunities for friendship with educated men and women, and had won the respect of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. For six years – his longest stay in one place – he had occupied a respectable flat on the edge of Regent’s Park. As if compelled for a second time to kick away his chances of success and suitable companionship, Gissing ...”

“... that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ In Murdoch and Nagel I think we find the genuine spiritual impulse or ...”

“... gives short shrift to this larger story, and misses how remarkable it was that these two imperial powers, in the middle of the Second World War, agreed to rewrite the rules of global capitalism to make the world safe for the interventionist Keynesian state. The convocation of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, where the Keynes-White deal ...”

“... he told me that thanks to the Nigerian bomber he had been visited by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman, having asked his questions, went back to the US and told his readers that the city ‘was not Kabul … yet’, but that AQAP was a ‘virus’ that needed urgent attention before the spread of the disease became uncontrollable. He ...”

“... of state. Legal historians tend to shrug at this gross violation of the very separation of powers that Montesquieu and Madison purported to admire in the British constitution; but, even at the time, the crossover between justice and politics was a cause of concern: Poser quotes the comment of the Public Advertiser in 1777 that ‘a man clothed with the ...”

“... the abstract with the concrete’, yet at the same time he insists that ‘the mind has laws, powers and principles of its own, and is not a mere dependent on matter.’ Hazlitt admired Lamb because his friend’s ‘love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal.’ ‘Taste’ in this context is both an accomplishment and an ...”

“... and there is no court of appeal in the French text. As Prendergast puts it, ‘no one has monopoly powers over the “correct”.’ We can prefer one version to another, but then we are choosing one understanding over another: either (mostly) the understanding we ourselves have, or (better) an understanding we hadn’t thought of before. We often think the ...”

“... with the landing of Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces in Egypt. Nowadays, Lewis said, ‘the outside powers are not as interested in the Middle East as they were.’ This meant that the region had returned to its old patterns. The crowd held its breath: Islam’s desire to conquer the West was in the air. Lewis confirmed it. He said that the Muslims’ first ...”

“... wife of St Clair McKelway, who had been a talented writer and editor under Harold Ross but whose powers were then in decline. He was handsome, suave (his advice to reporters was ‘to be more debonair’), charismatic and completely unstable – an alcoholic who suffered from manic depression, which worsened as time went on. He became famous for transforming ...”

“... against the over-mighty state was once regarded – by such men as Sir William Blackstone and Thomas Jefferson – as a crucial function of the jury, elevating it to a high place among the defining institutions of a political democracy. For Alexis de Tocqueville the American jury was an ‘eminently republican element in government’ which ‘places the ...”

“... every case, as Susan Williams explains in White Malice, the US, attended by the former colonial powers, fought hard to influence the turn of events; before long, as Natalia Telepneva shows in Cold War Liberation, her account of decolonisation in Portuguese Africa, Moscow and Beijing were staking their own claims to Africa’s postcolonial future.Ghana ...”

“... Books of Jacob. I don’t think it’s coincidental that The Empusium, with its echoes of Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain, came out as The Magic Mountain hit its centenary, an anniversary marked everywhere with articles about ‘Mann’s many prophetic ironies’ and ‘nuanced discussions’ and so on. No mention at all of the ‘painful ...”

“... ecclesiastical tradition. The high point was reached more than three hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Browne published his Religio Medici, and Johnson’s indebtedness to this tradition is seen best in his borrowing of two habits common to such books: the sarcastic ridiculing of all secular opposition and a pious refusal to believe that atheism really ...”

“... delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a ...”

“... and an uncanny end. Against Camillo’s advice in the play, Morgan makes a wild dedication of his powers to unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, but his excess has method in it, however outlandish. As in the poem ‘Heaven’, and the remarkably achieved ‘Alphabet of Goddesses’. Jeffrey Wainright’s Selected Poems are taken from The Important Man ...”