“... and a confident lack of that ability. And I have further to insist – having described Mary Ann Evans as a savant and remembering that she hobnobbed with the great intellects of the age and was known as the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach – that the creative genius was incomparably more intelligent than the other George Eliot. This is a point that ...”

“... of sleep and waking’. Maybe the extreme predations of neoliberalism do call for an extreme faith in nature in this manner, but such prefiguration is not yet a politics. It is also at odds with the Foucauldian assumption, which informs both Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception, that almost everything is constructed.Over​ the last ...”

“... has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...”

“... as they put it, and their belief that their hard-won position as ‘Englishmen of Hebrew faith’ would be threatened by the promotion of a new Jewish nationality. And so Zionists looked for gentile support. When Winston Churchill deserted the Tories for the Liberals in 1904 he was obliged to find another parliamentary seat, in Manchester North ...”

“... this tie closer than in England. When war broke out, English anthropologists snapped into action. Evans-Pritchard, stuck in a ‘reserved occupation’ as a lecturer at Oxford, made an excuse of continuing his research in the Sudan, where he recruited Anuak tribesmen to fight Italians on the Ethiopian frontier. Edmund Leach, while researching his classic ...”

“... dubious. Dave Hickey may not like Koons’s work all that much but he seems to share Koons’s faith in the beneficence of the market and, as such, finds himself tied, whether he likes it or not, to the same aesthetic presuppositions. Hickey, it seems, wants to have his market cake and eat it too, letting us know that nearly everyone in his corner of the ...”

“... like Orwell or Woolf, or avowedly scientific monographs by anthropologists such as Firth or Evans-Pritchard. In principle, three types of author were professionally distinguishable – the journalist, the writer, the scholar. In fact, Seton-Watson, most unambiguously a scholar – chairs in history at London and Oxford – made his name as a periodical ...”