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“... has a firm place in British intellectual life, stretching well back into the 19th century, as Philip Abrams showed in his masterly book The Origins of British Sociology. Equally, a concern to reduce or to ameliorate poverty is a strong tradition running from Booth, Rowntree and the Webbs to Titmuss and Townsend. Classically, information is gathered ...”

“... incoherent. (Reviewing himself, he adds, he might say the same.) Leach, Hinde and Kolakowski, and Abrams, too, in a sane and often elegant account of how history and sociology connect (divided, Abrams insists, not by logic, only by rhetoric), are all concerned not simply to survey but also to argue. Each, in doing ...”

“... Braudel is different. His thesis, on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, was certainly long enough and ambitious enough – the first edition of the book ran to some six hundred thousand words, and it has since been considerably enlarged. As a result of the war, most of which he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp near ...”

“... think of pseudy dudes in black 501s and Doc Martens, then I would prescribe a small daily dose of Philip Terry, for whom being experimental chiefly means being thoughtfully rebellious and funny. In his translation of Dante’s Inferno (2014), Terry is guided through the hell that is the University of Essex (where he is professor of creative writing) by the ...”

“... Orwell would have disliked New Labour. Am reminded of an essay written by the sociologist Philip Abrams back in 1964 in which he complained about ‘the difficulties our political leaders evidently have in saying exactly what they mean when they speak of “modernising” British society’. 5 November 1997. To hear Lord Nolan give the annual ...”

“... Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel that you have got something extraordinary for a pleasingly modest sum, but also that ...”

“... administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. The Lobby ...”