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“... partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in ...”

“... upset. Aside from Berlin, the only thinkers to survive Gray’s bombardment without a scratch are Michael Oakeshott and Karl Popper. Gray even pays Oakeshott the compliment of quoting him twice: ‘In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for ...”

“... herself is the first to admit. The final essay in the book looks hopefully to the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott and is forced to come away disappointed. Oakeshott’s emphasis on unpretentious ‘experience’ may have advanced a salutary critique of the busybody system-builders of thirty years ago (or might have ...”

“... Hailsham considered Conservatism to be ‘not so much a philosophy as an attitude’. Finally, Michael Oakeshott, the leading Conservative philosopher of the 20th century, wrote of ‘the distorting mirror of an ideology’ and identified the main enemy of limited government as ideological politics and state planning. Above all, ...”

“... in Hobbes owes its impetus to the writings of three men: Howard Warrender, Quentin Skinner and Michael Oakeshott; of these, it is Warrender’s book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1957) that has produced the greatest quantity of subsequent discussion and development. This book had the merit of taking Hobbes seriously as a major moral and ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for ...”

“... appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become ...”

“... of them rather whiskered but both of them rather well-made. He summarises the style of his guru Michael Oakeshott, who he met as a brother officer in the course of a fairly undemanding war. Worsthorne seems to have intuited all or most of Oakeshott’s elegant resignation about politics and action from his view ...”

“... Investigations, there have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history ...”

“... Nature has served as a revolutionary concept in its day, while from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott the notion of culture has been for the most part a conservative one. When the political regimes of 18th-century Europe heard the word nature, they reached for their cultural privileges. The notion that everything is cultural, including the ...”

“... of Northern Irish unionists, Arthur Aughey, a devotee of the English conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, argued in the Belfast Telegraph that, since Brexit ‘intimated dis-union and radical disruption’, remaining in the EU would have been the prudent unionist option. But the Democratic Unionists have, bizarrely, spurned every chance at ...”

“... the historian Lecky pronounced in 1892. And not long afterwards, Isaac Foot, the father of Michael and a firm Cromwellian, used to ‘judge a man by one thing: “Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?”’ Worden has no time for Postmodernism, the view that ‘the past exists only in the present’s head, and that ...”

“... treatment of persons. Among its heroes are Isaiah Berlin and, with a good deal of qualification, Michael Oakeshott; on the Left there is the author’s contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. Others’ heroes – Raymond Williams, for instance – are sometimes harshly dismissed (‘a nonconformist spellbinder, rhetorical, evasive and vacuous’). These judgments ...”

“... partly by government attention to the long-term resource situation. Gray stands with Hayek and Michael Polanyi in regarding the epistemic character of markets as their greatest virtue: markets can transmit through price signals a vast amount of local information about economic conditions and initiatives that simply cannot be made available for general use ...”

“... illuminating cameos of (among a host of others) Montaigne, Burke, Schleiermacher, William James, Michael Oakeshott, Dilthey, Dewey, Rorty, Benjamin (perhaps the book’s hero) and Bataille. There are, inevitably, one or two slip-ups en route. Bacon is made to sound too much like Descartes; the philosopher John Toland was not British; and Raymond ...”