“... appears as something sublime; and a man who does not submit to the machinery, though submission may mean his death, is regarded as a sinner against some kind of divine order.’ Arendt’s sombre vision struck a nerve. In a memoir of New York intellectual life, Midge Decter has recalled the debates that raged in the early Fifties over Arendt’s ...”

“... royal event. This was Mass-Observation’s study of King George VI’s coronation in 1937 – May 12. Two hundred ‘observers’ were posted about the country and instructed to note what they observed: with the exception of those who kept a record of what they themselves felt, they were not to intrude or act as mediators – simply to observe. There are ...”

“... 31 December 1765, Rousseau’s capacity for clear judgment faltered.’ Even the most paranoid may sometimes be right to believe they are suffering unjust persecution; but the effect of being right is almost sure to be to make them entertain even wilder suspicions. By this time, Rousseau had worn out his welcome at Môtiers, and had accepted Hume’s offer ...”

“... by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.’ Similarly, when he writes in 1932, It is going on. It is going to be like this tomorrow. Attendance-officers will flit from slum to slum, educational ...”

“... disputants agree on one single point, namely, that their opponents were all in the wrong.’ It may have been fun, but the disputes took their toll. The problem of vertebrate origins and, more generally, that of the evolutionary relationships of all the animal phyla, were coming to be seen as insoluble; the best young scientists were moving on to other ...”

“... people – what they are like as sources of testimony, whether and in what circumstances they may be trusted.’ Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a gentleman’s agreement: that so-called ...”

“... portrait of Mrs Riddle, tea is represented as a ritual occasion, as part of a feminine rite. It may be that she saw her sitter’s vocation – building a seemly or even an exquisite atmosphere, manipulating the tea things, pouring, arranging her clothing and decor with a sure grasp and a keen aesthetic sense – as an analogue to her own work in painting a ...”

“... take it, is that if practical, adaptative emotions are replaced by others, we do not simply, as it may seem, withdraw from the world. We change it, or it changes with us. I don’t know how far we can go with Musil down this road, or how far he himself, ever the target of his own irony, believed we could go. But the mode of thinking shown here, what Musil ...”

“... the method and purpose of the Brecht we still see on the stage and the bookshelf, a Brecht who may be more profitably confronted when the fiftieth anniversary of his death comes up in seven years’ time.Of all the postwar moments that Brecht could have chosen to die, the summer of 1956 was probably the most piquant. In February Khrushchev had denounced ...”

“... causes and forms, political and social as well as religious and theological. ‘The’ Reformation may be the greatest myth of all. Although ‘it’ was described, as recently as 1996, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, as a ‘world-historical event’, there turn out to have been all sorts of events, reformations in lower case, as the glaciers ...”

“... It may well be that the most interesting literature of this century cannot be subsumed under the broad label of Modernism or be said to have originated in the great literary centres, but was actually the work of outsiders and mavericks, starting with Kafka, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions ...”

“... was in some sense the accommodation they made with each other, and although to an outsider it may look strange, it is not the same as having an unhappy marriage. In any event, Winston, unlike many of his contemporaries – Duff Cooper, Oswald Mosley – seems not to have strayed. Nor did he pursue anything similar to the ambiguous amitié amoureuse of ...”

“... notorious role, persuading said daughters to boil their father to death. It came third, and you may well have thought this Medea of over twenty years later would be an improved version of the same tale, designed to carry off first prize second time around, but the Nurse who recites the prologue passes quickly over all those other dramatic Medeas and leaves ...”

“... can offer a class which has them. No wonder New Labour cannot find the appropriate ideology. It may well be that this is unnecessarily pessimistic. It is certainly the case that the broad middle class is now the one that matters, but it is perfectly possible to devise a coherent political programme which is consonant both with the traditions of the Labour ...”

“... employees somewhere in the middle and the actual right to use people as chattels – goods that may be bought, sold or exchanged – at the other. And in precolonial Africa, for instance, where rates of natural population growth achieved by marrying and begetting were consistently low, it was customary to augment households by acquiring people ...”