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“... The best thing I ever did in my professional life was to move from the Daily Express to the Guardian just before the 1964 General Election, and then to stay there. It seemed a good idea at the time, and nearly thirty years later I have no reason to change that judgment. On the contrary, the more I reflect on it the more grateful I am to my own relatively youthful prescience, and even more so to the gambler’s instinct of Alastair Hetherington, the then editor of the Guardian, in taking me on ...”

“... doubt. His mother’s marriage to a retired general in 1893, when he was ten, got him into the best school in Vienna and gave him a taste for expensive society. His first wife, improbably for such a high-living and affectedly heroic young man, whose outlook on the world owed not a little to Nietzsche, was the daughter of a dignitary of the Church of ...”

“... clear that, left to themselves, they have left themselves much to say. It was Henry Sidgwick who best exposed the pretension. And it was Sidgwick who, from well beyond the grave, did as much as anyone to keep the subject out of Cambridge. Yet he was not an obvious enemy. In the 1860s he had lectured on philosophy and political theory in the Moral Sciences ...”

“... The first poem of For the Unfallen (1958), Geoffrey Hill’s first book, was entitled ‘Genesis’. It declared: By blood we live, the hot, the cold, To ravage and redeem the world: There is no bloodless myth will hold. Hot blood is at the heart of Hill’s theological, oppositional poetics. Man’s passions may turn vicious, but without them he is unredeemable ...”

“... on power. This increases the hazards. The aerodynamics of the modern cars, which would allow the best to drive upside down at 150 mph, are designed to stop them taking to the air at 200 mph when the right way up on the straight and to give the drivers an even chance of taking them round corners. They press the vehicles’ flat bottoms down to a millimetre or ...”

“... trustworthy. ‘The way they represent things as being is the way things really are.’ And the best way in English to describe this relation is to say that they ‘correspond’ to the way things are. This is philosophy in the best modern American manner. It doesn’t start by assuming that the intuitions with which ...”

“... Goethe, on the British periodicals and on four writers, Coleridge, Carlyle, Eliot and Lewes; Geoffrey Hartman ranges widely through 19th and 20th-century criticism in pursuit of the idea of philosophic criticism, as it derived from Friedrich Schlegel and his German contemporaries. For both authors to a remarkable degree the central figure is Carlyle. For ...”

“... to get spending down. None of these had much effect. A Green Paper in 1986 conceded an at best ‘modest success’. It proposed the Community Charge, which a White Paper in 1983 had declared ‘unworkable’. But by then, many local authorities were having to account creatively and borrow from abroad. To the Government’s delight, that reduced what ...”

“... the advent of industry and widespread literacy, and is nowhere more powerful now than in many at best partially industrial countries in the East and South.) Anderson’s own objection is to Gellner’s rationalism, his indifference to nationalism’s emotional pull. Isaiah Berlin, by contrast, understands that well, and has written wonderfully about it. But ...”

“... quick sensibility necessary to transform the stuff of tedium into something interesting. Editor Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith has put flesh on the rather bare bones of the diary by editorial insertions. Throughout the text he has scattered passages from Gran’s own memoir Fra tjuagutt til sydpolarfarer, written many years after the expedition, and from ...”

“... as ‘the new policy’. They were also referred to as such on different occasions by Sir Geoffrey Howe, by Margaret Thatcher and by various government spokespersons. When Parliament was eventually let in on them in October 1985, it was in answer to a request for a ‘statement on the policy of Her Majesty’s Government governing the exportation of ...”

“... enthusiast for Mill’s essay On Liberty. Proportional representation, he argued, would effect the best balance between the representation of the views of the majority and the representation of the views of various minorities which can check any tendency to tyranny and which in themselves are often the most enlightened. It would also prevent such ...”

“... is lacking. Very few Dutch works are cited, although the leading Dutch historians are among the best in Europe. How can the economy and society of the Golden Age be understood adequately without reading the works of Faber, Klein, van der Woude and van Dillen? Yet only one work by each of the last three is mentioned. Matters concerning England are treated in ...”

“... that marks our acts. Agency shapes itself aesthetically, and the styles we inhabit are best understood as artifacts, or ‘expressions’ – purposive structures shaped by understandable intentions. In Altieri’s way of thinking, the subject has no problematic ‘depth’, no layers, no fugitive energies creating opportunities for ...”

“... favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour Declaration, both Balfour and Lloyd George became committed believers in the Zionist cause. Again, this was no obvious manifestation of ...”