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“... questions of quality and value. This, once more, is a thoroughly traditional moral project, which Thomas Aquinas would have had no trouble in recognising. Moralism and idealism must be refuted, and the question of what we ought to do must somehow be anchored in the way it is with us. But the spectre of reductionism is not simple to exorcise, and it is easier ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”

“... schmoozed Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when they happened to be ...”

“... revolution’ – though in Southern Europe too, to echo the words of the great German historian Thomas Nipperdey, ‘in the beginning was Napoleon.’Isabella shows that the 1820s uprisings originated in two distinct institutional contexts. First, there were the secret societies, which ‘found in the organisation and principles of European freemasonry a ...”

“... feels ‘rigged’. The scholar who spoke most successfully to this indignation was the economist Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the 21st Century (2013) used tax data and other archival sources to demonstrate that rising inequality has been a basic tendency of capitalist societies for at least two hundred years.* The reason for this, simply put, is that ...”

“... analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially commissioned article by a professor of philosophy, Louis O. Mink, discusses Hexter’s theories of history ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should not exaggerate the amount of patronage available to evangelical scholars under Henry: Henry, after all, did not like their views, and only patronised them when their views on something else appeared to be more important to him. In her ...”

“... ideas. He devotes his second chapter to a review of political theorists in the background – Hobbes, Locke (a Royal Africa Company shareholder), Hume, Rousseau – and has interesting things to say about them all. How far their doctrines are really relevant to Paine is queried in another recent book, by David Wilson, and it may be safer to look to the ...”

“... discontinuities between technical discourses, Foucault’s work was often found compatible with Thomas Kuhn’s accounts of paradigm shifts in the natural sciences. Foucault writes a history of the way various disciplines for acquiring knowledge evolved, but he avoids the ‘Whiggish’ assumption of the necessary superiority of later theories, especially ...”

“... political power, and is the more glaring when the form that power takes is force majeure. Contra Thomas Nagel and other US liberals, leaders who can segue fluently from blowjob to prayer-breakfast should give us pause for thought. The gospelling blag takes a darker turn in ‘the new military humanism’ or, in other words, killing people as an act of ...”

“... did not just rechristen the Incarnate Infinite ‘man’ instead of ‘Christ’. Rather, from Hobbes on ‘the infinite serves ... less to answer one of the great traditional questions than to blunt it, less to give meaning to history than to dispute the claim to be able to give it meaning.’ The substitution of an infinitely long time in which progress ...”

“... Great writers usually do, nonetheless. ‘Fame wants to find safety,’ as Canetti has put it. Thomas Mann was notorious for his self-importance and his suspicion of anyone whom he felt might be detecting signs of weakness in him; Thomas Hardy spent his last days writing venomously bad verses against fellow authors whom ...”

“... They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against Heidegger. These philosophers still award a special ontological status (‘fundamental reality’) to the elementary particles discovered by the physicists. They believe ...”

“... distance from Keynes himself, modern day economists of a reformist disposition, such as Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, nonetheless reprise the sensibility typical of Keynesianism. Keynes​ was the paradigm, but was he the first Keynesian? Mann’s answer is bold. If Keynesianism is a constructive liberal response to revolution, a response that ...”