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“... from public life, ‘very down and down on himself’, according to an old friend quoted by James Macintyre in this well-sourced biography. He spent most of this period at home, a detached Victorian house in North Queensferry, a village looking across the dark waters of the Firth of Forth towards Edinburgh, where his political career had begun. He ...”

“... In a previous book, After Justice, which came out in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre claimed that the ideas of justice available in the modern world are like a pile of ruins, historical fragments that can make no coherent sense. Politicians, reformers, administrators, appeal in a haphazard way to items in this deposit. Philosophers and social theorists toil away trying to make sense of it, but they cannot possibly succeed ...”

“... After The Road to Botany Bay, Australian history might as well be left to the historians. Stuart Macintyre, author of the fourth volume of the Oxford History of Australia, covers the years 1901-1942 in good plain style, with words like ‘bourgeois’ kept well in check and words like ‘spatial’ nowhere to be seen. Aiming to get at the truth, which is ...”

“... his authorised version, published The Unknown Courier. So the tale has been told before, but Ben Macintyre has done a more thorough and readable job of it than his predecessors. His access to the classified documents and unpublished autobiography that Montagu, who died in 1985, left to his son Jeremy make this the most complete account to date. Operation ...”

“... of a Perfect Commonwealth’, had already been put to revolutionary use. The list of books James Madison had recommended in 1782, as the first acquisitions for a library for the Congress, had included Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects as well as his History of England; and in his contributions to the Federalist in 1787-8, Madison had ...”

“... unity as a ‘final inexplicabilily’. It is not surprising that Hamilton’s defenders, such as James McCash, the President of Princeton, who published a rejoinder in 1866 entitled An Examination of Mr J.S. Mill’s Philosophy, being a Defence of Fundamental Truth, fastened on this as evidence that Mill, as much as Hamilton, fell back upon first principles ...”

“... free to overlook: Robert M. Adams, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross and Richard Swinburne, for example, have all made contributions far too substantial to be thus ignored. Dr Küng’s enormous apparatus of bibliography and references gives no evidence that he even knows most of their work, even when he cites some ...”

“... Conservative (1979), of the conflicts in a group that has included Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, James Hum ham and Russell Kirk perhaps overstresses the origin of these conflicts in individual idiosyncrasies. For conflict and contradiction are at the heart of the principles of American intellectual conservatism. Some of its adherents are would-be followers ...”

“... generation that includes, among others, Foucault, Habermas, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Derrida. Currently Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, he came of philosophical age in the early Fifties, in a milieu where the very idea of professing, say, a ‘general theory of value’ – never ...”

“... to the preservation of traditional scholarship. The founder of its Duke University branch is James David Barber, a civil rights activist and past president of Amnesty International, which suggests that the association may be something other than a hotbed of reactionary prejudice. At all events, Fish circulated his letter among a handful of ‘trusted ...”

“... might seem quite incompatible with the ‘virtue’ morality of an Aristotle or Marx. Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams have both famously contrasted the two lineages, and for rather different reasons shown Kantian morality the door. The Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio is somewhat more prudent. In these essays on ethics and politics, he ...”

“... are the great Latinist George Buchanan and the Gaelic poet Alexander Mac-Donald. Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s expansive 18th-century Gaelic poem on deer (echoes of which can be heard in Crichton Smith and Les Murray) is juxtaposed with John Davidson’s ‘A Runnable Stag’. This should have been the book which set the agenda for all future collections of ...”

“... to help arrange a meeting at Ruskin College where Cliff spoke and was seconded by C.L.R. James, who made an electrifying speech on the reality of imperialist war. If it seemed faintly improbable, on the cusp of 1968, to believe in a group that advocated revolution without illusions, at least one could see every day that the careerist supporters of ...”

“... in any case is continuity thought to be a virtue? Is a coherent life always desirable? Alasdair MacIntyre, an endurantist par excellence, argues that ‘the unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest,’ but not all narratives are unified, and many of them are none the worse for that. In literary criticism, the dogma that a work of art must ...”

“... because it confounds moral life with doctrine or dogma. We need only the reminder of Henry James, who, while cautioning against any ‘moral restrictions set upon the field of consciousness’, affirmed the moral character of art: ‘to count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as it would be (if the ...”