“... relationship with the government of Henry VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to England, executed (by strangling before his body was ...”

“... then enforce. This totalitarian power could, it was presumed, be enlisted for liberal ends. It may be significant that the argument for the intimacy between language and power germinated in France during the last decade of de Gaulle, and took root in the United States during the Reagan years. For the twin properties of language that seemed to be ...”

“... back’), and the frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary life of San Francisco. But much of his poetry has also been laden down with ...”

“... difference between gently suggesting, as universities always have, that attitudes acquired at home may need supplementation or correction, and telling undergraduates that they are sick and need treatment. It is one thing to treat undergraduates as fellow citizens who might be persuaded to think and act differently from their parents. It is quite another to ...”

“... situation, and the need to insist on the absurdity of the absurd. Horror and meaninglessness may be frequent, even banal, but we are lost if we treat them as normal, as all there is: if we abandon our anger at the affront they offer to reason. If our normality helps us to struggle, our rage may help us to survive. But ...”

“... asks what it is likely to contain and where, and digs up what he is looking for. In doing so he may cut corners, and he may get things completely wrong at first, but he will end up finding what he wants. To disagree with such an operator is taken as a sign of inferior intelligence, and probably jealousy as well. He is ...”

“... exclamations in The Tempest or Descartes’s explanation of the rainbow. Experiences of wonder may be by definition rare, but for Fisher they are dispersed all over the map of knowledge. He is particularly severe with Romantics like Keats, and the whole gloomy procession of disenchantment theorists, who accuse modern science of murdering wonder and regard ...”

“... stories told by Gerd Gigerenzer. The sales of a company fall by 50 per cent between January and May. Between May and September sales increase by 60 per cent. Is the company in better shape in September than it was in January? Down by 50 per cent and up by 60 per cent sounds to many people like an overall 10 per cent ...”

“... what is’. Words cannot penetrate the intricate texture of things, however seductively they may evoke it. At the same time, language has its own textures and metamorphic properties, which may reflect the world but must not be confused with it. It is Peck’s least Poundian characteristic that provides the key to his ...”

“... a signal contribution to our understanding of how science works and what it achieves. Scientists may be good at running science, but nobody understands very well how it works. Our best models of how they test their theories have absurd consequences – the idea, for example, that every observation is evidence for every theory – and our accounts of where ...”

“... the veil of what we could possibly know, is a humble admission that our best efforts to understand may well fail to grasp how the world is. Claiming truth is the way we take on the risk of radical human fallibility. A central task of philosophy, for MacIntyre, is to grasp this vulnerability and make it explicit. It is not that we can somehow stand outside our ...”

“... The​ plan to ‘off-shore’ asylum seekers to Rwanda was the last straw. In May 2023, I resigned as a (part-time) immigration judge after twenty years in the job. It was less a matter of conscience, more of recognition that the role had become irrevocably tainted by the politics of asylum. For years, people coming to the UK for respite from horrors in their home countries had faced increasingly oppressive measures and an ever more hostile environment, and the judicial end of the immigration and asylum system, it seemed to me, was becoming part of the stage business in a theatre of cruelty ...”

“... to be found, even among the most liberal-minded, sophisticated and liberated people. Homosexuality may be the one subject left in America about which there is no official hypocrisy … Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable ...”

“... much time worrying about. Recent examples such as US student loans or the Chinese property bubble may well be on your mind if you’ve just graduated from Tufts or bought a flat in Shenzhen, but otherwise they’re probably not keeping you awake at night. The condition of the Eurozone, and of the European Union more generally, was once on the list in a way we ...”

“... There is no​ magic money tree,’ Theresa May said during the election campaign when confronted by a nurse complaining about low pay. Yet now that the Conservatives need the support of the DUP to give them a working majority, suddenly the magic money tree appears: £1 billion of additional spending has been promised to Northern Ireland ...”