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“... There are writers and artists who dislike themselves – who attempt through their work to unearth, refine and then extrude something better than they are, something detached, pure and free-standing. I was put in mind of this recently while reading Ray Monk’s painful biography of Wittgenstein, who succeeded in creating a body of philosophical work so much finer and nobler than himself that for someone who has developed a strong attachment to the work, the contrast is very disturbing ...”

“... as multiculturalism, free speech, national self-determination (in an essay jointly written with Avishai Margalit), and on the nature of law and its relation to morality (a subject on which he is in the positivist tradition of H.L.A. Hart). The essays use and develop ideas set out in his earlier books, particularly The Authority of Law (1979) and The ...”

“... not accepted by Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud leader and Israel’s prime minister. ‘Shamir’, as Avishai Margalit presciently observed, ‘is not a bargainer. Shamir is a two-dimensional man. One dimension is the length of the Land of Israel, the second, its width. Since Shamir’s historical vision is measured in inches, he won’t give an ...”

“... humanity of the enemy?’ How, then, should you write about suicide bombing? It is not just, as Avishai Margalit puts it, that every statement about it is liable to be contested. Nor is it just that the vocabulary is disputed (describing these attacks as ‘suicide bombing’, as the term appears in the title of each of these books, is already to beg ...”

“... of a utilitarian two-state partition. The letter, I was recently told by its Israeli recipient Avishai Margalit, contained, as he drily put it, ‘nothing to write home about’. Coming well after the Oslo Agreement, and stressing Muslim holy places in Jerusalem rather than the actual Arab inhabitants of many denominations, it was little more than a ...”

“... in the way we understand psychic wounds. They are better seen as part of the expansion of what Avishai Margalit has called the ‘ethics of memory’, which holds that communities are made and remade through shared memories and obligations to remember. We live in an age in which claims and counter-claims to collective memory abound: in memorials, in ...”