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“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John StuartMill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”

“... writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John StuartMill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John StuartMill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with ...”

“... rather than attempt to exhume a real hero of their own. They thought they could finish off poor John StuartMill, but they never succeeded, except in their own estimation. Now, however, we are faced with what may be an even more forlorn effort, to fold Thomas Carlyle to their collective bosom. It so happens that ...”

“... he was one of the founding fathers of London University. Like a number of the Victorian sages – Mill, Carlyle, Lewes – Grote had a highly intelligent wife who was a full intellectual helpmeet, and like even more of them (add Ruskin, Pater and George Eliot, for example) he was childless – to be exact, his only child died a week after birth. The sight of ...”

“... to spread his doctrine, is stressed. Then we have the rigid, limited, puritan monolith of James Mill, applying the Bell and Lancaster system, not only in the horrifying way in which his own children were to be educated, but as a description of the progress of different branches of the family of nations: ‘The human race is like a growing family in which ...”

“... my heart and my judgment are equally satisfied with the man of my choice.’ The chosen one was John Austin, son of an Ipswich corn merchant of similar wealth and dissenting beliefs to the Taylors. Though John was only three years older than Sarah, his prematurely white hair and grave demeanour made him a surprising ...”

“... often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John StuartMill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his dogmatism, religiosity, ‘moralism’ and hostility to personal liberty). Nevertheless, prominent ...”

“... Jane Miller, who quotes this as one of the ‘views which men need women to have’, cites John StuartMill with equal pertinence: ‘We are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good.’ She admires Clarissa for its seductive ...”

“... it made womanhood a lightning rod for attitudes to capitalist modernity. What Adam Smith’s pupil John Millar decried as the ‘habits of avarice’ of ‘polished nations’ generated much moral disquiet in 18th-century Britain. People fretted about ostentation and epicureanism, about the emasculation of manners and morals by ‘unmanly ...”

“... American colonists, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ John StuartMill credited India’s free-trading British overlords with benign liberal intentions towards a people self-evidently incapable of self-rule. ‘Despotism,’ he wrote, ‘is a legitimate mode of government in ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... reggae music, multi-media happenings, what have you. But bless me, it seems I was wrong. For if John Gross isn’t duplicating for a later generation what the Earl of Birkenhead did for mine, I don’t know what he and the marketing managers at Oxford University Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John StuartMill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other ...”