“... argument is that defensible ethical claims can be made on both sides. In many scenarios, there may not be one single right course of action, but incompatible yet equally valid stances. In the tradition of virtue ethics, as derived from Aristotle, some moral dilemmas are ‘tragic’. They occur when two agents largely agree on the virtues relevant to a ...”

“... Davis suggests it might be, in her introduction to Rachel Careau’s new Chéri. Another reason may be the quality of some of the translations of her work: Roger Senhouse’s widely used version from 1951, as Careau points out, has phrases like ‘Oh, my sainted aunt’, not to mention ‘a Chinee’. In her introduction to Eprile’s rendition, Thurman ...”

“... of some power, if no precise focus. Our own experience of so-called ‘football violence’ may well interest future historians on this basis. But Patterson argues that it was not until after the Midlands Rising of 1607 ‘that Shakespeare was forced to admit that the popular voice had grievances that the popular theatre could no longer express ...”

“... you cannot spend day after day with the same person: it becomes psychologically destructive. You may not hate each other, but you do get very irritated. There was a good library in the prison but it had no works by Marx. Marx’s writings were reserved for the prison officers! So I wrote to the Governor asking for books by Marx. I did this after I found out ...”

“... of Anglo-Indians to the later poem, ‘A Charm’: Take of English earth as much As either hand may rightly clutch. In the taking of it breathe Prayer for all who lie beneath. Not the great, nor well-bespoke, But the mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death is none Report or lamentation. When T.S. Eliot, in the course of an essay of fine ...”

“... a pound: as one reads of the grossness of his later years one wonders whether sheer self-disgust may not also have played some part. But surely, too, it was a simple matter of self-fulfilment, of gratification of ego? We are told that inside every fat man there is a thin man trying to get out. Doriot may have been a case ...”

“... and Levi’s uniqueness is that he is even more the artist-chemist than the chemist-writer – he may well be the most thoroughly adapted to the totality of the life around him. Perhaps in the case of Primo Levi, a life of communal interconnectedness, along with his masterpiece on Auschwitz, constitutes his profoundly civilised and spirited response to those ...”

“... and very polite to each other; and are very polite again as soon as the quarrel is over. We may want to remember though what Proust says about nice people in a notebook: ‘In my novel, there is an ultra-bourgeois family, how many sick people in it?’ – ‘combien de malades dedans?’ What seems to have happened is that at the end of the episode of ...”

“... for his first and last chapters, and the theme of the private realm as something easily forfeited may engage him more profoundly than his thriller plot, for all the casual mastery of his handling. The meeting of Calvin’s Neighbourhood Watch, long delayed, beautifully led up to, is a classic of grotesque comedy. Only one little incident, early on in the ...”

“... Union army. Should Lincoln’s generals return slaves to their owners, as federal law required? In May 1861, Butler declined the request of a Confederate commander for the return of three escaped slaves. When informed that he was in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act, Butler politely replied that the Act ‘did not affect a foreign country, which Virginia ...”

“... me to the airport,’ he told the Telegraph, ‘I just want to get back to the US’ – may have lost him some of his audience among right-wing broadsheets and tabloids in this country. But the anchors of America’s cable news networks remain deferential. And Michael Gove, one of the Tories’ me-too neocons, has enlisted him to help devise a new ...”

“... reasons, it takes a lot of watching to make sure that one of them doesn’t slide sideways.May I also remark that, as a literary critic, I can claim the dismal eminence of being the only expert on the subject of ‘A is B’ [see The Structure of Complex Words], so that being actually set to tell the Queen that she is a Goddess appeared to me a ...”

“... the village where he was born and from which he was expelled with the rest of his family on 14 May 1948. Al-Ma’in and other Palestinian villages were soon cleared and replaced by the agrarian kibbutz settlements that were attacked on 7 October 2023. The settlers expanded Israeli territory through cultivation, removing the remnants of Palestinian ...”

“... coverage of Franco’s speech in Burgos, for instance, is ‘nauseating’.) That a candidate may have committed bloodshed or pillage has never posed much of a problem in the annals of canonisation. Berend doesn’t demonstrate that it was an issue for medieval ecclesiasts to receive huge booty from someone who killed large numbers of people, or was too ...”

“... of millennia of art and culture, evidence of the rise and decline of regimes. However Stalinist he may be by temperament, his culture turns Italian Stalinism into something other than its Russian original. The man who made that change most explicit was Antonio Gramsci, the intellectual founder of Italian Communism. Gramsci saw from the beginning that Lenin had ...”