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“... and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods. This is what academics do when we curate syllabuses, make appointments, allocate graduate places and funding, peer-review papers and books, and invite speakers. In each of these cases we are exercising our professional judgment about the intellectual worth and seriousness of other ...”

“... and the evidence mounts, the volumes become fatter. Those who have laboured in the past through D.A. Winstanley on Cambridge, C.E. Mallett on Oxford and Hastings Rashdall on the Medieval university will find the going even heavier: a reflection of the state of historical research today and the problems of assimilating or reducing unprecedented quantities of ...”

“... the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of other empires had done (see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) were allayed by victory in the Cold War and the subsequent discovery that its economy is the driving force ...”

“... like Major himself, accepted almost without question the Unionist formulation: Sinn Fein/IRA. They do so in spite of the fact that few details of the relationship are known and many of the ‘insights’ plain wrong. The Sunday Times, for example, was demonstrably mistaken when it announced that Gerry Kelly, one of Sinn Fein’s chief negotiators at ...”

“... and the aggressive mother was making it impossible for anyone to get inside; in conclusion, she’d like to stick a few Katyushas up the mayor’s arse (my impression is that the poor man is doing the best he can). I am squeezed through the crowd to talk to the municipality spokesman, Doron Shanfer. He treats me to a hard-line racist speech, denouncing ...”

“... to a friend shortly afterwards, ‘though the Evening Standard man told me frankly that they’d all written their pieces about Naipaul and felt they were free to get drunk.’ Unlike the others on the shortlist, Offshore was, in the words of Asa Briggs, who chaired the judges, a roman pur: short, deep, highly crafted, about a colony of misfits in London ...”

“... at least in Protestant accounts. Greater notice is taken of the plaudits of the chronicler Edward Hall and of the (qualified) gratitude of the martyrologist John Foxe. Yet there has been an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if ...”

“... Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One Fat Englishman, is warned that he’s about to say something he’ll be sorry for, he replies, ‘those are the only things I really enjoy saying’ – and there isn’t much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards ...”

“... by stopping. Direct communication isn’t an option: the only way to get a driverless car to do anything is to contact the company in charge of it.In early October, a driverless car owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, hit a woman who’d just been struck by another car, and in the course of performing what ...”

“... the artist as tortured genius is replaced by the counterfeiter as tortured genius, who doesn’t do anything as crude as imitation but must fully inhabit the psyche of the artist, whether it’s Dieric Bouts or Memling. Bouts finished his work and moved on, but Wyatt must take care, while artificially distressing a painting to simulate the effects of ...”

“... while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon. Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as ...”

“... to America to improve their lot, or, more accurately, to make it possible for their children to do so. Certainly, my paternal grandfather, who was his whole life a poor ragpicker with a horse and wagon, did not dramatically advance his own fortunes; I imagine he could have done what he did just as well in Kovna. But what could not have happened in Kovna ...”

“... is behind one of Clare’s greatest poems, ‘Birds Nesting’: To the worlds end I thought I’d go And o’er the brink just peep adown To see the mighty depths below. Clare is thought of as a marginal, provincial poet, who inhabited a remote green world of heath, woodland, riverbank and marshland, but Bate draws attention to the richness of the cultural ...”

“... coffee shops glowing with an occult circle of pale screens and fearful concentration. Why do these digital initiates always look as if the screens hold bad news, as if the power is on the point of shutting down permanently, leaving them disconnected in outer darkness?That coffee sign was a border marker, preparing me for a series of designated smoking ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”