“... now rarely viewed as anything but positive. In the era of rock and roll and of Philip Glass and John Adams, it seems normal and desirable for music to aspire to be a narcotic. We live in the time of the triumph of the ‘theatrocracy’ that Nietzsche deplored, in which we can find many descendants of Wagner’s favourite dramatic form, the pseudo-spiritual ...”

“... to the streets of Whitechapel as Sinclair knew them in the Seventies. Up from the river comes John Gull, an early 19th-century Essex wharfinger who soon succumbs to cholera. Adopted by a parson and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s ...”

“... Managers and workers jointly resist any attempt from above to extract more effort from them. John Hicks’s dictum that ‘the greatest of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’ may be particularly apt here. Relations between the state enterprise and its immediate political superiors exhibit similar complexity. There is clientelism, in that the ...”

“... of myself as a mental self, my feeling is that I am continually new. In his autobiography, John Updike writes: ‘I have the persistent sensation, in my life ... that I am just beginning.’ This seems exactly right. The experience of the ‘I’ as in some sense new each time is (I suggest) fundamental and universally available, although it is ...”

“... Letters carried powerful charges. Intellectuals of very different origins and interests – like John Locke and Giambattista Vico–cared deeply about the French versions and summaries of their ideas which could bring them to, or distort them for, a European public unwilling or unable to read English and Italian. Unfortunately, like more modern literary ...”

“... the immediate aftermath of Conceptual Art, in the late Sixties and on into the Seventies, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Victor Burgin, Les Levine and others used billboards for work which blended fine art with political propaganda. By dethroning painting, Conceptual Art opened the gates to a range of other media, not simply text and installation, but also ...”

“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... going on’, 1914 wiped out any ambivalence. The immensely popular Inside Europe (1940) of John Gunther summarised feelings on this side of the Atlantic: ‘It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred ...”

“... tradition that we use to understand our lives. In Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992), John Gray proposed a vulgarised version of narrativist-deconstructionist psychoanalysis. Since we ultimately ‘are’ the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the solution to a psychic deadlock resides, he proposes, in a ‘positive’ rewriting of the ...”

“... Revolution (1990), found Cairo University records giving Arafat’s birthplace as Cairo. Janet and John Wallach, who wrote Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder (1990), came up with his Egyptian birth certificate. Arafat shrugged off the disclosure. Said Aburish, a Palestinian whose biography is the best available in English, sympathises with Arafat’s original ...”

“... harmony with nature, they have done so only by sloughing off the association with cannibalism. In John Boorman’s Hollywood movie, The Emerald Forest, the cannibal Indians are the bad guys, in league with the dam-builders who will flood the forest and dispossess the friendly Indians who are the film’s heroes. This is in line with Lestringant’s general ...”

“... remind one of Mill’s correctively secular comment in On Liberty: ‘It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either.’ The young Augustine was more inclined to the Periclean than to the religious-ascetic life. He first travelled to Carthage in 371, to study rhetoric, and there he fell in with a group ...”

“... we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely (Berlin might have added) by Henry Sidgwick. This great tradition of classical utilitarianism proved impressively successful at occupying the entire conceptual space, thereby managing to dismiss any rival interpretations as ...”

“... now. So it is that we learn that as an actor Shakespeare played Old Hamlet, Adam, Friar Laurence, John of Gaunt, Henry IV, Egeon and Duncan, but then again perhaps he didn’t, since all we have in support of this claim is a late rumour and some unverifiable computer analysis. Shakespeare’s will seems to confirm a well-established estrangement from not just ...”

“... little of the venom or relish of such fellow plutocrats as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Most criticism he ignored, cultivating a forbidding taciturnity. ‘He left no record of his response’ is a familiar motif in the biography. What Morgan left instead – and what the biography exhaustively records and explains – are ...”