“... certainty as we can from its surroundings. A figure like the 19th-century English literary fraud John Payne Collier could probably never have flourished in France: if such a person has existed there, then the memory has not survived. No one will ever write his biography, or write about him a book resembling the one that ...”

“... argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide between them, owes almost everything to John Rawls. Barry, certainly, has no doubt: Rawls is simply ‘the greatest political philosopher of the century’. But Rawls’s qualities, as Barry describes them, his sense of the range of considerations, his subtlety, his sheer fertility, together with his ...”

“... approach. The most notable example is the great contribution to the theory of justice presented by John Rawls, who pioneered the revival of the contractarian approach, but has increasingly stressed the universalist concerns of a Kantian concept of ‘the person’ (especially in his 1980 Dewey Lectures*). The recent ...”

“... member of the Commission on Presidential Debates, can claim particular authority. (‘President John F. Kennedy told me more than once’ is the book’s opening phrase.) His and LaMay’s study is overwhelmingly concerned with the complex and often tortured history of the debates as an institution. There is some information – but not a lot – about the ...”

“... 1934, only two or three quavering voices were raised in his defence and then were heard no more. John Payne Collier also had a few defenders at the outset of his ordeal, but after his presumed exposure was complete, no one publicly doubted his guilt, or that his purposes in committing his sensational hoax were an unforgivable breach of scholarly ...”

“... realism about perception that he shares with such of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... genius when pressed by the libido) neatly classified in the manner of the estimable Melvil Dewey or the subject – splitting metaphysicians in the Library of Congress’s cataloguing division. The Kinsey Institute is now leading the way to the light by perfecting such a classification system. Legman asserts that erotic bibliography is ‘certainly the ...”

“... a host of others) Montaigne, Burke, Schleiermacher, William James, Michael Oakeshott, Dilthey, Dewey, Rorty, Benjamin (perhaps the book’s hero) and Bataille. There are, inevitably, one or two slip-ups en route. Bacon is made to sound too much like Descartes; the philosopher John Toland was not British; and Raymond ...”

“... was delayed until April 1949 so that Harry Truman could fight off a challenge from Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 US presidential election. Britain requested that the treaty be signed in Barbados; Portugal suggested the Azores as a symbolic mid-Atlantic location; but the US insisted on Washington and so it was. Say what you will of the Delian League, at ...”

“... portrait has is ‘character’, she notes briskly, something altogether different from John Singer Sargent’s vapid sitters. Here the critic’s way of looking ‘as a woman’ means fully recognising Cassatt’s achievement in bringing ignored and devalued female subject-matter into the painting of modern life – the world of upper-class ...”

“... gives the story its title, is killed before he can make the purchase by a brutish poacher called Dewey Floyd who works as a yard hand and lives in the woods. Floyd tells Webster he did it because he was drunk: ‘You see, I was mighty close to them dawgs, an’ that li’l one were my fav’rit. Sadie were a real stylish dawg. I jes don’t know rightly what ...”

“... both those whom he admires, like Kierkegaard and Burke, and those he largely rejects such as Dewey and Rousseau. He favours a sort of capsule narrative of intellectual debates juxtaposed with recent historical events. But there is a second, quite distinct, mode of persuasion that becomes very marked in The Irony of American History. The prose sometimes ...”

“... than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”