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“... a brief postscript to one of the chapters and a few remarks in the preface, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits was written before the current crisis. Yet, based on research undertaken over many years, it can be read as prefiguring the current disillusionment with economics. The trouble with prevailing theories, in Akerlof and Shiller’s ...”

“... atheism. In the same vein, one of Williams’s recent predecessors as archbishop, the late Robert Runcie, described the ethos of the Anglican training college he ran at Cuddesdon in the 1960s as one of ‘detached, slightly amused liberalism’, an echo of the ironic, minimalist churchmanship which so exasperated po-faced orthodoxy during the age of ...”

“... unliterary, yet, I believe, convincing way, this is demonstrated in Richard Elliott Friedman’s book Who wrote the Bible? He shows that the critics’ questions about date, authorship and original use of the various Biblical books are sometimes answerable and, what is more, worth answering: it is not a matter of complete indifference whether a ...”

“... as Baldwin did – as ‘an ugly name for an ugly thing’. Where would she be without Hayek and Friedman, Burns and Minford, the Institute of Economic Affairs or even the Conservative Philosophy Group? Ironically, the zealots of the Conservative Party (or arditi, as Critchley calls them, which is more than Neil Kinnock would dare to do) closely resemble ...”

“... a capital ‘h’, and without the stronger proprietorial claims now well-established. Philip Friedman, pioneer of Jewish history under the Nazis, used it: but only as a descriptive equivalent with several others, and he seems to have preferred the expression ‘the Jewish Catastrophe’. At this stage ‘holocaust’ may have been more commonly attached ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... team wouldn’t rush to give reconstruction contracts to France, Germany and Russia,’ Thomas Friedman grumbled in the New York Times, ‘but why shove that in their faces while we’re asking them to forgive Iraq’s debts?’ Or was the Wolfowitz directive a bargaining chip placed on the table as part of Baker’s negotiating strategy? Are the two wings ...”

“... the blinding flash of the first atomic explosion revealed their labours had not been in vain.J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project and hence ‘father of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer ...”

“... moved on, surely reasonably, to 1914-18. Reminiscent in some ways of Paul Fussell’s work, and of Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 in others, this book has a thesis. Like Wolff’s, it works outward from particular occasions to generalisations. One is the first night of Le Sacre du Printemps in May 1913, ‘a milestone in the development of ...”

“... been confined to the publications of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the teachings of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek; but she had not ‘acquired the critical capacity to apply tests of commonsense when it came to putting ideas into action’. It may be tempting to think that, had her university course included economics in place of chemistry, she ...”

“... the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... and gave few grounds for the ‘rational expectations’ they were supposed to induce. Milton Friedman complained that his doctrine was invoked ‘to cover anything that Mrs Thatcher at any time expressed as a desirable object of policy’. Or, as Jenkins puts it, ‘behind the altar’ the Treasury was as usual doing what its ministers wanted through the ...”

“... of the American political system that you can call the president a moron – or, as Thomas Friedman recently put it on the front page of the New York Times, ‘flat-out dumb’ – but you can’t call into question the sanctity or power of his office. Whatever your complaints, the president has ultimate military authority, and there are plenty of ...”

“... broadly right, even if it is far from the mainstream view among the Anglo-American commentariat. Robert Kagan, for example, remains bullishly confident of America’s supremacy in his new (and ruefully titled) book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.* He believes that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the ...”