“... of exhaustion’ – the exhaustion of ‘the philosophy of consciousness’. Habermas may be the best critic these philosophers have yet had – the most understanding and imaginative, if also the most implacable. Further, the drama Habermas unfolds in this richly-textured and vibrantly polemical book is likely, for accidental reasons, to become ...”

“... PLO, no to a Palestinian state. Their only positive contribution was Yitzhak Shamir’s plan of May 1989 for elections on the West Bank and Gaza leading to limited autonomy. But Shamir only put this idea forward in response to pressure from Washington and he gave it up at the first indication that the Palestinians might accept it. The Gulf War produced a ...”

“... in 1840. No one seems to have suspected George Drysdale (while those who were in on the secret may have numbered no more than half a dozen). Drysdale was not a candidate for suspicion, in the sense that not many people even knew of his existence. He moved to London in the mid-1850s, and is listed at various Central London addresses in the Medical ...”

“... A figurehead is needed to resolve a case like Pierre Loanga’s, but the Commissioner in Basoko may not be up to it; he may fear to act in case he is contradicted by a senior man, or merely a bigger man – the General, say, on one of his excursions from Kinshasa. It’s easier to refer up into the sullen reaches of ...”

“... and intellectual? If so, those who connected the text with the detailed analysis of works of art may once again have assumed what they could not prove. The problem here is simple. One cannot determine the purpose of documents like Della pittura and its Preface, or the needs they served, without referring to the larger genres to which they belonged. And that ...”

“... while waiting for Gallimard to publish his two books – which they did, to great acclaim, in May 1942. As his health deteriorated he was treated by a Jewish doctor – the Pétain regime had not extended its Jewish round-ups to Algeria – and, though his previous Communist career caused him to be more careful than he had been, he was never very ...”

“... of the composer, has dismissed the entire affair as a fabrication on Thomson’s part, and Blondel may be too ready to accept the story at face value. (Butts also refers to an otherwise unnoticed affair with Wyndham Lewis, a man not known for discretion.) Yet Butts and Thomson seem to have developed a real and lasting affection. Well into the Seventies, he ...”

“... about Anne Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis rather than Shakespeare, and readers of Bishop’s study may be similarly surprised to learn that ‘the figure of the Virgin Mother’ is ‘Shakespeare’s deepest presider over the scene of reunion’. It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to overlook Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder. Bishop close-reads ...”

“... so is the duty to pay the owner for the use or acquisition of their property.In retrospect, it may seem that, despite their origins, neither development was particularly revolutionary. Hannah Arendt thought Robespierre was Marx’s ‘teacher in revolution’, but on the question of property, at least, the French revolutionaries were far from being ...”

“... a little better they wouldn’t have bustled about the world appropriating things. A gentleman may make a large fortune, but only a cad can look after it. It would have been so much pleasanter to live in a small community who knew Greek and played games and washed themselves.Buchan couldn’t rise to quite this level of effortless superiority. After ...”

“... documents from centres where … scholars are apt to look for and expect them in the future, we may be doing a disservice.’ When his team reached nearby Bonn, he was relieved to find that Allied military government was in place and imposing order. ‘The period of the snatch is therefore past.’*Max Loeb, a German-born book-dealer, took the 30,000 ...”

“... and had a brother, John, who was also a scrivener (i.e. professional scribe) – though his role may well have extended to the abridging and interweaving of the two playscripts. (John had been apprenticed to Francis Kyd, father of the dramatist Thomas Kyd, which offers a faint literary backdrop to Robert’s activities.) The use of his name on the title page ...”

“... In February, Nato announced it was expanding its deployment in Iraq to four thousand troops. It may be possible to make a cleaner break in Afghanistan. But the Afghan security forces Nato claims to have trained are a shell. The invaders are leaving graves behind but precious little else. The civil war will continue.The​ Ministry of Defence tried to ...”

“... and Ethiopia have led to long panel discussions about whether or not it is alarmist to think we may be on the verge of the first transboundary water war. That war hasn’t yet materialised, but neither has an agreement, and the reservoir is filling. When people in Egypt talk about this fact, the body part they gesture to most often is the throat: two hands ...”

“... technique to imitate “magic picture pad”,’ reads an obscure note from 1970-71. ‘There may be the question of resemblance or substitution (Freud).’ Maybe with a nod to toys like Etch A Sketch, Johns here alludes to the ‘mystic writing pad’ that Freud used to describe how the unconscious operates, the way it retains inscriptions even ...”