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“... race or sex, Singer argues, so it is ‘speciesist’ (a term coined by the animal rights advocate Richard Ryder) to hold that humans count for more simply because they are human.This extension of moral equality, Singer is careful to point out, does not mean that it is always impermissible for humans to harm or make use of other animals. From a utilitarian ...”

“... the rationalisations. This script could certainly have made a good film: it was intended for Richard Lester in 1982, but ‘the finances were never found.’ The other three film scripts have become real movies. One of them, The Comfort of Strangers, is another macabre: it adapts Ian McEwan’s novel about an Italian sadist and his subservient wife ...”

“... but after the Revolution Locke faded from sight across the Channel. At home, however his fortunes may have gone up or down, the topics that he discussed came to constitute philosophy. Locke was no sceptic, in the philosopher’s sense of that word, but he surely was sceptical. English-language philosophy has been sceptical ever since. Locke set the ...”

“... and other reptiles. Planting one’s flag on a root sheath of hair, significant though it may have been in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the ...”

“... was never more solidarity in the Army than at the height of debate and discussion. John Lilburne may or may not have been a bore, but it was his astonishing personal courage and persistence that dragged a prisoner’s ‘right to silence’ from reluctant authorities: a right considered so important by American ...”

“... and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and professionalism in government, that was ...”

“... looked in the days of Senator McCarthy and of Dr Strangelove. The French Communist Party may have provided the mass base of militant anti-Americanism but, as Kuisel notes, Communist propaganda only amplified what others thought. The great ‘Coke war’ of the Fifties makes this clear, when a mighty campaign was launched to ban the soft drink and ...”

“... out for their quintessentially Post-Modern character. One was the fall of a Tory junior minister, Richard Spring, exposed by your old friends at the News of the World for taking part in a three-in-a-bed sex session. This was a political ‘event’ supposedly ‘reported’ by newspapers and television. But the event itself occurred only in order to be ...”

“... Diane Sawyer, as she moves from ‘Henry K’s lap’ to the former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke to her current husband, Hollywood director, Mike Nichols. Sawyer, also circulating from the Nixon White House to CBS’s 60 Minutes to ABC’s Prime Time, earns almost as much in a single day as is earned in a year by the mother she berated on ...”

“... could further have made the perfectly reasonable argument that if you are going to lose you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and stick to your principles. But Heffernan and Marqusee believe that the election could have been won and was lost largely because socialist principles were not stuck to. This is surely much more doubtful. Prima facie it ...”

“... of Operations, not so much doctoring the spin as applying snake oil to it, said: ‘This may be Dodge City, but Wyatt is in town.’ According to this model, it seems that the marshals from out of town would sooner shoot it out with ‘the bandits’ than, say, take advantage of superior numbers and firepower to encourage them to throw down their ...”

“... remains blank, with the super-title, ‘Permission to reproduce denied’. This happens in Richard Billingham’s case as well, although his pictures of his family escape Stallabrass’s everlasting fire. Concurrently with last year’s Turner Prize show at the Tate, Ana Maria Pacheco, a Brazilian artist long resident in this country, showed the works ...”

“... with every pick-up truck he sold. (The voucher was for the semi-automatic version. US gun laws may be liberal, but they do have limits.) More to the point: the Kalashnikov has probably killed more people than any other hand-held weapon in history. That makes it one of the great industrial success stories of modern times. It was, of course, a Soviet ...”

“... finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996) in order to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Abraham ...”

“... language of the heart’ and so on. Bushrui and Jenkins stress Sufi influence on Gibran and there may have been some. Nevertheless, every element in his thought can alternatively be traced to Western sources, including Blake, Nietzsche, Emerson, Maeterlinck, Whitman and Ouspensky.Ouspensky was perhaps the most interesting of these influences. He was born in ...”