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“... academic philosophers who have bewitched themselves into a sense of a civilising mission. For Richard Rorty, philosophers’ obsession with such merely mood-enhancing words as Reason, Reality, Truth, Objectivity and Method is little more than the fetishism of an increasingly parochial discipline. If you really want to understand how knowledge is made and ...”

“... Grandma Lu, her father’s mother, and she doesn’t need to be blamed outright to feel punished.Richard Beard’s extraordinary memoir of 2017, The Day That Went Missing, has the same starting point, a brother drowning, apparently within reach of a sibling unable to help. Richard was eleven in 1978, Nicky nine. They were ...”

“... It plays on the child’s dream of omnipotence – the friend who is equipped with superhuman powers, but who remains dependent. And in its domestication of the superficially repellent, E.T. reflects the vogue for the rubber monsters that were popular toys a few years ago, a vogue now undergoing a revival with the international distribution of ETs in ...”

“... road Hillary Clinton would likely have pursued?Ten years ago, when Iran was the focus of the big powers’ nuclear concerns, I suggested that a deal might be possible whereby ‘Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help.’* Five per cent is a level of enrichment ...”

“... DeSantis they have extended to criminalising those who oppose them and asserting unprecedented powers in the name of ‘freedom’.I hadn’t heard of the University of South Florida before I applied for the job. During my time there, the administration was desperate to make the university into a brand. Managers obsessed over rankings and over what they ...”

“... in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard eventually chased Dawkins out of the ...”

“... perhaps a little ambitious even for Burke. In April 1758, shortly after the birth of his son Richard, he agreed to compile and edit a new periodical to be called the Annual Register in return for a fee of £100 a year. A second son, Christopher, was born in December 1758 and it soon became apparent that Burke’s literary earnings would not suffice to ...”

“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... his words’. Dr Johnson, an expert fault-finder, found many faults, without doubting the poet’s powers. Indeed the necessary warnings were first expressed by Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson, who loved the man ‘this side idolatry’ – certainly he ‘wanted art’, certainly he could be hasty and careless, but could still be said to be ‘not ...”

“... hostility to eloquence and represented it as compatible with the exercise of reason. Richard Tuck’s essay, on Hobbes’s religion, also brings out differences between Leviathan and the earlier works, which had been less theologically unorthodox and less profoundly anti-clerical. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since Pocock urged that ...”

“... crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are Richard Gott and Partha Chatterjee. Gott, who describes himself as ‘a historian in private practice’, has written a wide-ranging study of resistance to British rule in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and the Antipodes. Some of the longest chapters ...”

“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”

“... is a branch of psychopathology at least as plausible as Adam Smith’s faith in the harmonising powers of the Invisible Hand. The most crucial (and piquant) irony of the debt crisis is that it arrived just as the Invisible Hand was making its biggest comeback in fifty years. In this age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, when the ‘new realism’ of the ...”

“... trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of absurdity. On at least two ...”

“... embarrassed to turn himself into ‘one of the leading literary entrepreneurs of his day’. The powers that be had not rewarded his talents, so let fashion and the literary marketplace do so. His father’s adult life, too, had been a hunt for preferment. Roger Sterne, an army ensign, failed to achieve promotion until a few months before his death. After ...”