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“... you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who used initials for their forenames – H.E. Bates, W.H. Davies, L.P. Hartley. Yet early reviews compared Coppard to Hardy, Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, and he was acclaimed by (among others) Ford Madox ...”

“... a web-based guide to reading The General Theory). Instead, his subject is the politics of the brand of liberal technocracy to which Keynes’s name was attached. From the first, Keynesianism was defined in opposition to an ‘old’ or ‘paleo’ liberalism anchored in individual rights organised primarily around property. From that followed a dogmatic ...”

“... partly thanks to the classic splendour of the OUP production, but it is unlikely to be the last. Thomas Cranmer and his fellow Protestants felt that Latin excluded uneducated laity from the proper praise of God, and designed the first English BCP in 1549 to replace the Latin liturgy of the Western Church. Yet Cranmer had absolutely no objection to Latin as ...”

“... skyscrapers designed by celebrity architects, flanked by shopping malls displaying every Western brand, and serviced by wage-slaves from South Asia and the Philippines. Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, was founded when the Old Testament was still being written, edited and collated. It’s true that the new Mövenpick hotel in the heart of the city’s diplomatic ...”

“... sliced-thin sentences leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by wiring themselves into consumer culture, conspiracy theory, pop iconography and spy-craft technology, trying to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel ...”

“... her own idiosyncrasies had become a survival mechanism.’ It had also become part of her brand. When Édouard Dubufe painted her portrait for the Salon of 1857, she insisted on replacing the ‘boring table’ he had envisaged with a giant bull’s head, painted by herself. The hulking beast upstaged Dubufé’s stilted portrait and pointed to the ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic ...”

“... sufficed to dethrone Descartes. Dennett realises that nothing will do that job except a brand-new description of ourselves, one whose use will gradually dissipate our tendency to build Cartesian presuppositions into our questions about the mind. The difference between Ryle and Dennett is the difference between saying that, since Descartes bamboozled ...”

“... to happen, we might as well enjoy them when they do. (Basically, it’s the argument advanced by Thomas DeQuincey in ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.) Football used to take a similar approach. When Frank Rijkaard spat at Rudi Völler in 1990, we were showed the flying lump of gob in slow motion from about ten different angles. But this ...”

“... the communities in the Niger Delta of any rights to a commodity that was shortly to finance a brand-new capital city even as it polluted their farms and rivers, destroying the traditional bases of their economy. Following the deaths of General Abacha and Chief Abiola in June and July 1998, ‘civil society’ organisations and prominent individuals ...”

“... on 24 January 2003: Andy – one of our royal policemen (St James’s Palace) has obtained the brand new Green Book, the telephone directory with all the phone numbers of the royal family and their household staff. Incredibly useful … The standard price is £1000. So far so good. But I had a heck of a time getting cash creds signed off by Stuart ...”

“... and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for wrecks, and it is said that the best ‘wreck dive’ in Britain is to the ...”

“... recognisably liberal.Gray is not, of course, the first to pick universalism as a target. This brand of liberalism is the multicultis’ big bugaboo, attracting as it does charges of x-ocentrism, for the nasty x of one’s choice, be it European cultural hegemony, the rampant phallus or the merely human view. The guiding idea behind fat-face ...”

“... a billion people in the 20th century alone – and blinded and disfigured many more. It was, as Thomas Macaulay said, ‘the most terrible of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of ...”

“... and life flourished.The second evolutionary leap was made, as Lovelock sees it, in 1712, with Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the atmospheric engine. In itself, this modest apparatus doesn’t suggest the dawn of a new era: a small fire heats water, driving steam into a cylinder; the steam is then quickly condensed, creating a partial vacuum that allows ...”