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“... convention can be reconciled with his admiration for that most ‘conventional’ of philosophers, Edmund Burke. One is left wondering at times whether Keynes’s affirmations of nihilism were not merely expressions of a delayed adolescent desire to shock: Cambridge ‘clever-clever’ rather than serious moral conviction. Nevertheless, this first volume ...”

“... others. ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, Horace Walpole, Lord North, Charles Fox, the Younger Pitt and Edmund Burke were among those who were robbed or shot at. Yet the victims of crime were rarely prominent people: small shopkeepers and the middling sort were the principal sufferers. The law was not just an engine of the rich for use against the poor. At ...”

“... same time as mocking them herself. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), she attacked Edmund Burke for mean-spirited ridicule, while making fun of his ‘infantile sensibility’ and delicate ‘nervous system’. It was wrong to despise one’s inferiors, Wollstonecraft believed, but ‘dignified’ mockery could unmask the pretensions of ...”

“... Its inspiration was medieval chivalry, which the Scots, and other enlightened modernists like Edmund Burke, regarded as the forerunner of civilised manners. Women and Enlightenment also examines in rich detail the rediscovery of Britain’s Gothic heritage, with its cult of the ‘lady’ as the embodiment and guardian of chivalric values. Some women ...”

“... and data are tangled with theories; norms are tangled with forms of life. I think Hume and Edmund Burke had this more or less right: ethics is intrinsically about us in ways that empirical science isn’t. Consensus about norms rests on – presupposes – convergences of sympathies and sensibilities in ways that empirical consensus doesn’t. In ...”

“... did not believe that as yet this nation had a patrie. Only with the Revolution did the French, as Edmund Burke put it to the Irish patriots in 1782, ‘begin to have a country’. They saw the task of the Revolution as regenerating, building the nation afresh, to make the French worthy of it. Beneficiaries of the collapse of a centuries-old former ...”

“... a brilliant classical scholar. Others had more future potential than existing achievement, notably Edmund Burke, whose groundbreaking Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful had already appeared but whose career as a political orator and thinker was yet to take off. Other heavyweights joined a few years ...”

“... and recitations, and had made a small fortune in the art of ‘lending existence to nothing’, as Edmund Burke defined poetry. Thomas Hardy gave her the blurb of a lifetime when he said that the two greatest things about the United States were the skyscrapers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Her poems are still in print, and her famous lines still ...”

“... it ‘the one Irish century that escaped from darkness and confusion’. Swift, Berkeley, Burke, Goldsmith and Sheridan: all these stood for clarity of thought, while Dublin gaiety, Belfast liberalism, and the sense of national consequence acquired at Dungannon, all contributed something to the Yeatsian image of a mellow era. That this particular form ...”

“... takes rise from two lines of Yeats: American colonies, Ireland, France and India Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it. The problem is how to use the first line to answer two questions: how did the ‘great melody’ come to be uttered; and what exactly was ‘it’? Yeats answered the latter: Whether they knew or not, Goldsmith and ...”

“... sat in the Commons at some time during this period; 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 ...”

“... challenge to the very notion of throwing up barricades. The name for this contrast in Britain is Edmund Burke, who came from a nation, Ireland, where the sovereign power had failed to root itself in the affections of the people because it was a colonialist power. In Burke’s view, this rooting wasn’t happening in ...”

“... of a right to office against a medley of contrary factors: the powerful intellectual influence of Burke, who early recognised him as the spokesman for the Whigs, the instinctive sympathy of Fox the indulged child and adult libertine with any rebels against authority, English, American or French, the intoxication of a popular role and the pressure from his ...”

“... and reviewer for Johnson; it was her bread and butter, but no more. The French Revolution, and Burke’s Reflections on it, fired her to a riposte which brought her some notoriety, and her true originality appeared in 1792, with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Just about everything she wrote after that is interesting, and often surprising. Her ...”

“... political identities go together like Laurel and Hardy, and the august authority of the state, as Edmund Burke was aware, is a version of the sublime superego. There is that within any political power which is excessive, self-undoing, and so a threat to its untrammelled sovereignty. Daydreams of homecoming, nightmares of rootlessness, fetishism of the ...”