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“... from a speech by Pericles in an English translation of The History of the Peloponnesian War that Thomas Hobbes published in 1629. The sentiment expressed is one that haunted him throughout his intellectual endeavours. Hobbes regarded himself as one of the first philosophers to engage in genuine political science, by which he meant not only the analysis and ...”

“... which favoured Jewish readmission. MPs are unlikely to have been reassured by the activities of Thomas Tany, ‘Theaureau John’. Informed by nocturnal revelations that God had commissioned him to gather the dispersed Jews and lead them to the Holy Land, Tany proceeded to establish assembly camps at Greenwich and Lambeth, ‘tents for every tribe, and the ...”

“... signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in August and spent more than three decades in exile, in Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey and Bern. Revolutionary change in 1689 prompted him to risk returning to England, but this led to a fresh arrest warrant and Ludlow retreated again to Switzerland, where he died in 1692. Whalley and ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”

“... obedience to which constitutes the highest form of freedom, but his monologue also points to a more general problem: the ways we confound words and things, deceived by the multiple meanings and hidden implications of seemingly basic political concepts.Political theorists have long been aware of the dangers lurking in the superficially innocuous term ...”

“... Life and Letters, but also in smaller collections containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems ...”

“... so, since defining this entity in its own terms has always been problematic and is fast becoming more so.In part, and paradoxically, this is because the British nation has experienced such comparatively stable development since its invention in 1707. The French and the Irish can assert their common identity (whether it exists or not) by reference to recent ...”

“... current role as Rorschach and lightning rod. After Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, character witnesses for both sides testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Among those lining up for Thomas was a panel of women who had observed the Hill/...”

“... The US literary world can be divided into two camps: those who think Thomas Pynchon is a very clever guy, and those who also think he’s a great writer. As it happens, I’m of the former camp. While I admit that Pynchon’s writing is packed with all sorts of ideas, ultimately the novels strike me as more crudités than smorgasbord: the appetisers keep coming (and coming, and coming), but the main course never arrives ...”

“... With the inevitable exceptions of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx, it is doubtful whether any political thinker has inspired more sustained imbecility among his friends and enemies than Edmund Burke. And, despite first appearances, his appeal is far less predictable than theirs. Both Aquinas and Marx were in the first place theoreticians: the latter died at his desk, the former should have done ...”

“... in the 18th century, and in which the element of imitation, present in writing of every kind, is more obtrusive than it is in the other tale, is the livelier of the two. Pastiche is a dualistic activity, and it is an activity which can lend itself to the expression of paranoid feelings and unacted desires. A writer is copied by ‘someone other’ than ...”

“... women since 1919, but in a series of ignominious wrangles it managed to fail to elect a woman for more than twenty years. In the end, J.B.S. Haldane, writing in the Daily Worker, had to stoop – ironically – to the argument that if they could offer fellowships to Indians, surely they could not ‘exclude women indefinitely’. The women themselves have ...”

“... In​ 1841 Thomas Carlyle declared that ‘the History of the world is but the Biography of great men.’ Soon after, Thomas Babington Macaulay, a policymaker in British India as well as a historian, wrote that ‘a people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants ...”

“... him in both marriage and religion, converting to Christianity. The play was immensely popular for more than a century after its first recorded performance in 1621. But after falling out of the repertory in the mid-18th century, it languished in critical and theatrical oblivion for more than 250 years. Since ...”

“... be and must be made a turning-point, but one which from many points of view, as Hynes remarks, was more a running-down; it was a dead spot at the centre of the war, corresponding to an ‘imaginative vacuum’ on the part of writers, a feeling that war simply paralysed the imagination and could not be written about. The Armistice, argues Hynes, was not such a ...”