“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”

“... it emphatically? Oh well, I must have heard the emphasis you were holding back. This is what it means not to take no for an answer. Logic is a considerable cultural accomplishment, and so is the recourse to evidence. The notion that inclination lurks in disinclination and, more generally, that opposites can collapse into each other at any time, becomes very ...”

“... Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of ...”

“... between the two, both in perception and in action, is typically ‘indirect’, where that means something like ‘mediated by thought’. But plausible as that may seem, the thesis of Andy Clark’s new book, Supersizing the Mind, is that the mind v. world dualism is untenable. The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by ...”

“... government was good insofar as it enabled individual and religious liberty, the form taken by the means to that end did not really matter. As a result Milton is to be distinguished from Nedham by his relatively consistent commitment to a set of ethical and religious ends, even if the means he saw to realise those ends ...”

“... Brown and to which, Downing Street tells us, he remains committed. But given what the deterrent means to the country’s political class – the international standing they imagine it gives them – it is unlikely that a Cameron government would do away with it, whatever the expense.If value for money is the concern, Cameron could easily take an axe to the ...”

“... teacher Leopold Kronecker reviled it as ‘humbug’ and ‘mathematical insanity’, whereas David Hilbert declared: ‘No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.’ Bertrand Russell recalled in his autobiography that he ‘falsely supposed’ all Cantor’s ‘arguments to be fallacious’, only later realising that ‘all ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly ...”

“... and monumental look – can inadvertently create a false impression. ‘Collected letters’ means, after all, ‘surviving letters’, and even though so much is here one is bound to wonder what is missing. Consider the case of Hardy’s mother. Jemima Hardy died in her famous son’s 64th year, and it is surely inconceivable that he did not write to ...”

“... provenances down to our own time, states of preservation. To recount these things is what it means to speak about the art of the past in an authoritative voice. Little thought is normally given, however, to the considerable anachronism that this priority represents in relation to the learned discussion of art in the past. The sort of art-historical ...”

“... I turned up on the first day. Then his manager announced that I was the oga’s ‘friend’ (oga means ‘chief’ or ‘boss’): the old school tie counts as much in Nigeria as anywhere else. Agbaje, who was standing for the third time, tends to surface only six months ahead of an election. As I followed his campaign I found it hard to see just where, or ...”

“... for a country undergoing political upheaval is a messy and dangerous business, and it is by no means guaranteed to succeed. We think of South Africa in the early 1990s as a heartening example. ‘A relatively conservative Afrikaner leader decided to negotiate before he had lost,’ the journalist Colin Eglin said, ‘and an imprisoned leader of a ...”

“... the sovereign as the law-making authority, unlimited and indivisible. Following Hobbes, but by no means acknowledging him, the 18th-century debate started from the premise that Parliament, the legislature, was the supreme body in the state. It had emerged victorious over its old rivals; its law was the supreme form of law and could override other forms; the ...”

“... political body, ‘the essence of personhood’. The normal word for ‘beautiful’, kalos, also means ‘noble and good’ – think of all those cards at Kensington Palace describing Diana as ‘a beautiful person’ and you are getting close to the confusion of categories. The normal word for ‘ugly’, aischros, also ...”