“... fact of literary education.’ Like Lawrence, Lessing is an author whose life and work are held to be intimately attuned to the Zeitgeist. Assessments of her writing usually home in on her ability to interpret and challenge the mood of the times, and wittingly or unwittingly, in her oracular pronouncements on everything from CND to paedophilia, Lessing ...”

“... Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on ...”

“... social forms and a war on ‘woke’. Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism is often held up as the ur-text of post-liberal thought. Yet many of national conservatism’s intellectual lodestars, such as the Ohio senator J.D. Vance (who appeared remotely in London, extolling the virtues of guns and coal), are better known for their fiery ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...”

“... cannot see this particular passage correctly even when he looks at it closely. Foucault’s view, held more strongly then than now, is that what individuals can think, and what they think they can know, is conditioned by a framework or system that permits certain things to be significant and excludes other possibilities. So he says there is a system that ...”

“... Party from 1933 until 1936, is an interesting case-study here. After the war, he was arrested and held at Nuremberg, where he was questioned by an American lawyer about the intellectual support he had given to Hitler’s regime. How could he explain his actions? Schmitt replied that he had been deceived about Hitler. What he had thought he was getting in 1933 ...”

“... opening sequence of a baggage train in hectic descent from a mountain peak, he cuts to a shot, held for at least a minute, of the raging waters of the Río Urubamba in the valley below. Three seconds of this would ordinarily have been enough, he has explained, to set a scene; the point of dwelling on an image of turbulent chaos is instead to prepare the ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... been a part of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost ...”

“... and bringing the experience of the present to bear upon the interpretation of the past’; it held huge, radical and ecumenical events, published pamphlets and books, and in 1976 founded its own journal, still running today.Despite – or perhaps because of – all this activity, Samuel only published one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... For David Edmonds​ , and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more ...”

“... he couldn’t be seen to run unless he could be sure he wouldn’t be humiliated again. So he held back, refused to campaign in any of the primaries, denied that he was a candidate to any journalist who asked, refused to meet the governors whose support he would need at the convention. He agreed to give speeches that would have raised his profile as a ...”

“... in the same tradition as Ruskin’s ‘The King of the Golden River’ (1850) where his fiercely-held political, aesthetic and ecological doctrines reappear in fantastic guise. In ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877) Mary de Morgan mounts a conventional attack on the conventional Victorian miss; and Frances Browne ‘exposes’ standards of feminine beauty by ...”