“... It may seem surprising that, within nine months of a famous election triumph, a government can look in such bad shape – its sense of purpose challenged by events and its supporter’ loyalty tested by unpalatable policy commitments. A particularly bitter personal twist is added when a prime minister, so recently hailed as the architect of victory, encounters increasingly open disparagement within his own party – not least from MPs owing their Westminster seats to his popular appeal ...”

“... in mountain air that does wonders for the lungs in these reptilian philosophical times. Bergson may not have had a ‘general principle’ qualifying him to perform as a public oracle, but he had one as a metaphysician, He is the one philosopher this century to have earned an -ism: Bergsonism is a headword to this day in our dictionaries. That it is so is a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the southern coast of Ireland. For centuries sea captains have used it as a landmark. On 7 May 1915 a local family named Henderson, picnicking on the promontory in bright sunshine, were admiring a huge passenger liner with four raked-back funnels steaming eastward close to shore. Suddenly a vast plume of water and smoke towered above her decks. Within ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wishes to know anything about his life?’) the printer refused to touch it. The reviewer – it may have been Wilson – exhibits Hogg as a liar, fool and plagiarist. About the kindest things in the piece are the aspersions on Hogg’s grammar: ‘Give him a sentence, and force him, at the point of a sword, to point out an accusative, and he is a dead ...”

“... practices. Following Schmitt, Agamben assumes that the rule of law is not like that. While it may be possible to fill in holes in the law through the application of general legal principles, the applicability of law itself is not a matter of jurisprudence. Although the law may make provision for exceptions of various ...”

“... of the poem’s copious notes) will know, they are ‘The five unmistakable marks/By which you may know, wherever you go,/The warranted genuine snarks’. The inappropriate source has been made appropriate, in a balance that is sustained throughout the book: intimate humane detail against myth, history and allusion. After art school and the Army, Jones ...”

“... mortgage repayments that nobody can ignore, but which nobody in power seems willing to prevent. In May, the average interest rate for a two-year fixed rate mortgage passed 6 per cent, a reflection of market expectations regarding Bank of England rate rises, which are in turn a response to the sustained difficulty of getting inflation down. Unlike in September ...”

“... a busy day, and that we’ve lost track of the subject of the verb in the last line, and that it may be time for another full stop. It’s true that it isn’t easy to characterise what universities are and what they now do, and so not easy to lay down a ‘vision’ of what they might do in the future. That is partly because of the intrinsic difficulty of ...”

“... takes all these for granted, and sets out instead to redress any imbalance their familiarity may have created by turning his attention to the violent background from which these achievements emerged. Haskins showed that not everything in the 12th century was ‘positively medieval’; Bisson reminds us that a lot of it was. His book has an anti-hero, the ...”

“... about which we know a great deal, from documentary evidence and living informants. His new book may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon ...”

“... did get on well enough. ‘More than likely,’ Hamilton says, they ‘did bury a few drinks. They may even have stayed up all night.’ However, Writers in Hollywood does take most of its information secondhand, and the narrative is a bit desultory, as if Hamilton didn’t always know why he was retelling this anecdote rather than that. He informs us, for ...”

“... little of world-shaking significance has happened there lately, although there are signs that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has yielded to Alexander’s Ragtime Band why bother about so long ago, so very far away? Of course, such ...”