“... between a national electorate and its leader in those terms, as if the general election in May were somehow a showy matrimonial sequel to the royal yoking due in April. Especially when Blair’s speech leaves little doubt as to who’s wearing the trousers: and it’s not the British people. ‘Decent’ and ‘hard working’ we ...”

“... have led him to act as he has over these past ten years. Whatever judgment ‘the people’ may come to, any history worth the name records as fact only what has been done; it may if it wants speculate as to why what was done was done, but only drawing a careful line between the deed and the possible motive. For Blair ...”

“... a critic who had something of her own range of knowledge, and she seems to ignore his views, so I may speak up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a ...”

“... and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only Newton’s laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so many possible avenues of research are being ...”

“... two more essay-collections before his death, but now we have two posthumous volumes, and there may be more to come. Considering the ever-increasing density and strangeness of his work, and its ever-increasing fame, it would take a very tough dean to say de Man had under-produced.The corpus is now augmented by a volume he would not himself have wanted to ...”

“... The Mirror is cracked and the images confused. It is part of the history of the British press, but may not much belong to its future. To a grammar-school boy growing up in the North of England forty years ago, the press was an honourable estate. At the centenary of the birth of C.P. Scott, The Making of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ was an ideal anthology for ...”

“... next three years, including the right to negotiate a new constitution with the Government, this may not have mattered too much. The subsequent NEC elections showed the strength of the SACP/MK bloc, with SACP members occupying five of the top eight spots. There was and is endless speculation over how many SACP members there are on the new NEC, with guesses ...”

“... or ‘nativist’ trend in present-day cognitive psychology.Various reasons for his invisibility may be given. In the first place, he had the misfortune to be appropriated, edited and ‘Hamiltonised’, as Keith Lehrer puts it, by the respectable but inferior philosopher Sir William Hamilton. In the second place, he suffered greatly in the collapse of the ...”

“... give us insufficient reason to conclude that any one of them is better than any other. This claim may be founded, as in Larmore, on a belief that there are many valuable conceptions of the good, or, as in Barry, on moral scepticism; each infers that no non-neutral state is justified, and assumes that the value-systems in question have equal value, or at least ...”

“... look systematically at the well-being of each, as opposed to aggregate or averaging criteria. It may seem impracticable to insist that social justifications must connect with the interests of absolutely everybody. Surely – says the voice of common sense – the most we can expect is that a credible justification be made available to the overwhelming ...”

“... of options among which we feel we must choose. Such exclusions, as well as restrictions on what may legitimately be taken into account in some decisions but not others (prohibitions against nepotism, for instance), typify the complexity of moral standards and suggest that an accurate account of morality and its role in life will not be simple. Thomas ...”

“... was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is pretty scanty and unreliable at most stages of his life, but a copy of his birth certificate ...”

“... has entered, and many suspect that under the name of ‘criticism’ all kinds of illegal goods may be smuggled in. Customs is instructed to make a proper search. Is ‘criticism’ a hidden agenda for Marxism, Lacanianism, structuralist anti-humanism etc? Originally, the resistance to allowing criticism the curricular dignity of, say, the Age of Pope came ...”

“... is especially noteworthy, however, is Brougham’s own suggestion ‘that a very honest mistake may have been the cause of the misunderstanding.’ The trouble with – and for – Brougham was that mistakes and misunderstandings became so frequent as to generate pervasive doubts as to his honesty. At what was to be in more ways than one the decisive moment ...”

“... subdue his tribal pride. By ‘Anglican’ Sisson means ‘English’. The Welsh, Scots and Irish may, perhaps, be permitted to eat the bread that falls from the masters’ table. He lists among ‘the disasters which have overtaken the Church of England in recent years’ both the Rome-favouring tendency and the ecumenicism – ‘the retreat from the claim ...”