“... which has to end an essay like this: ‘Even philosophy’s insistence on clear and distinct ideas may express this “ineluctable modality” of the perceptible that makes what we call representation the unexcludable middle between phenomenal reality and mind, between thinking in images and thinking by means of texts against them.’ This is a dour ...”

“... we were more like Sweden, only 20 per cent more like the United States. Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher may not call an election until late 1987 or early 1988, and even then, whereas the Conservatives only have to have 35 per cent of the total vote to be sure of being called by the Queen, and Labour 36, the Alliance has to have 41. The two old parties, even ...”

“... will come as no surprise to find that Elton now has Neale and Pollard in his sights, though there may be some surprise in the discovery of Pollard’s belief that ‘the failure of parliamentary institutions in Semitic or negroid communities is proof, not of the defects of parliaments, but of the political incapacity of those who cannot work ...”

“... between text, meaning and significance: carucatum means ‘ploughland, land for a plough’; this may signify a plough, a plough-team of eight oxen, enough leasowe and winter feed for eight oxen; and it also, or alternatively, signifies a fiscal valuation – a ploughland may be matched by a plough but it ...”

“... does not automatically, as many have expected, wipe out old feuds and prejudices: new mass media may harden them instead. He details the growth of the road network, enabling the farmer to bring his produce to the market and to move about and meet others, and the spread of literacy and publishing: all this has been amplifying public excitements, ‘changing ...”

“... While too little equality results in too little freedom, the active promotion of total equality may, he acknowledges, actually inhibit the freedom that greater equality is intended to make possible. The relationship of the two conditions can be envisaged as a curve, with freedom increasing with the promotion of equality up to a point, but then starting to ...”

“... This book needs to be handled with care. It may be other than it seems. Possibly the publishers were uncertain about what they had got; so am I. The author is well-known: ‘Colin Turnbull is Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University in Washington DC. He has lived and worked in India and central and eastern Africa ...”

“... the back or the lid of a small panel painting – would merit this sort of exegesis, but here they may not. Lightbown is as keen to expand on the historical events, recorded in published and in manuscript sources, which provided the occasion for Mantegna’s paintings as he is to investigate the objects depicted in them, and this, also, is often of great ...”

“... his reputation is surrounded by rumour, misinformation, disinformation. Shady and unpleasant he may have been, Nicholl says, but we owe him something – not simply because he was a great dramatist and poet, but because his death was murder, and the crime is unsolved. Nicholl is an investigator with a compelling sense of duty to the past and the people who ...”

“... is, what political responsibility means?’ I said: ‘For all we know, Somalia’s warring clans may be fewer in number than its peace-loving nationals, many of whom pursue sedentary vocations. It is those of us of the nomadic stock who are more vocal, and who claim to be the prototype Somali. To my mind, we’re bellicose beasts, forever at each other’s ...”

“... must have a mother to protect him... don’t you remember the night Monty was born?’) may have helped to harden her heart, however much she really did love and need her own children. As Worthen remarks, the battery of letters from Weekley and his family and friends, as well as from her own family, may have ...”

“... It appears only fitfully in the abandoned novel ‘Mood’, which dates from 1926 but which Green may have gone on struggling with after Living. Both the fragment and Green’s rueful discussion of it in 1960 are included in Surviving. He deplores ‘Mood’s technical shortcomings and his inability to profit from the kindly advice of Edward Garnett ...”

“... major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis wandered from Trotskyism into the ‘bourgeois deviationism’ of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The heteroclite ruminations ...”

“... casts a statistical suspicion on neighbours, friends and family.These enduring habits of thought may explain why, contrary to popular myth, it is on the whole far from easy to pursue complaints of sexual misconduct. Barriers to complaint are created not only by sexist attitudes, but also by the ways in which institutions work to protect themselves from ...”

“... brain is essentially the same as in the old body (no strange hormonal rushes). Even so, there may be limits on how different one’s new body can be if one is to remain the same person. I may feel I’m most essentially a mental self, that my identity is in some deep way independent of my body, but ‘I am not merely ...”