“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... is right to be aggrieved at Nato expansion. Talking points from Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, David Harvey, Bernie Sanders, Jack F. Matlock Jr et al are cited everywhere, along with Russian disinformation (the Russian TV station RT has a huge following on Weibo). Ukraine is often described as a failed state, its only hope of survival to accept its role as ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... as he was at the construction of unseen worlds. From another letter to Kandel: ‘Lem’s Three Laws proclaim 1) nobody reads anything; 2) if they read, they don’t understand anything; 3) if they read and understand, they instantly forget.’ The letter is dated February 1978, four months before I visited the New York Coliseum with my ...”

“... outside a more tightly co-ordinated Eurozone? In Au Revoir, Europe: What if Britain Left the EU? David Charter, a Times journalist, argues that the combined dynamics of growing Euroscepticism in the UK and increasing integration in the Eurozone mean that London will either have to negotiate a form of second-tier membership – some have proposed making a ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political ...”

“... science appeared to offer a way to rehabilitate the nation’s exceptionalist destiny by revealing laws of liberal progress that operated beneath the ethnic chaos of American society. Mead was born in Philadelphia in 1901. Her father was a progressive economics professor at the Wharton School, her mother a feminist sociologist who studied Italian ...”

“... a rough conception of ourselves as organisms causally embedded in the world whose constituents and laws we are trying to discover; so how things seem from our perceptual point of view clearly provides data for such an investigation. However, in the moral case we do not take our evaluative intuitions to be the result of causal interaction with the moral ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts were long and ...”

“... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...”

“... and other pre-emptive acts of violence. Another neo-con, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, recently blasted the CIA’s ‘bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians’ and praised those analysts who make ‘novelistic judgments’ informed by ‘history, literature, philosophy and theology’. Rumsfeld’s war on the ...”

“... been assassinated in Havana. When he didn’t hear, he calmly betrayed the mercenary force as the laws of realpolitik required of him. He forgot to confide in Arthur Schlesinger, but Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, in their authoritative ‘One Hell of a Gamble’, also state plainly that ‘the Kennedy Administration had expected Castro to die before ...”

“... not draw attention to itself and that it should work in optimal co-operation with nature, with the laws governing the ebb and flow of biological energy. A technique called ‘range of intensity limitation’ flattens the music out to make it unnoticeable, ‘like wind playing between the leaves of trees’ (Joe Coco, Muzak engineer for more than forty ...”

“... they cared about this least of all, made the US into World Bully, breaking no obvious American laws as they did so (the Valerie Plame case excluded). All this, until recently, with popular assent and elite approval.Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore, his book about America’s Civil War and about an American obsession with war, said of the literature on this ...”