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“... Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of Communists, The Manchurian Candidate is not a properly political film. In it, being a Communist means having ...”

“... Blessed is he whose mind had power to probe/The causes of things,’ Virgil wrote, thinking of Lucretius. But for many, knowing the causal origins of things can be reason for anxiety. Just as we might worry that tracing our family trees will turn up slave owners or madmen, we might also worry that genealogical investigation into our most cherished beliefs, values and practices will reveal what Nietzsche called pudenda origo, a shameful origin ...”

“... sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860). The ...”

“... view of the relationship between Greek cultural nostalgia and the realities of Roman economic power,’ because the satirical jibes are usually founded on a literary allusion. So exaggeration and literary sophistication are incompatible with social critique? For sure, Lucian doesn’t give a ‘balanced’ view, but then neither does Sacha Baron Cohen or ...”

“... have been a bid for his patronage. It was not until The Adventures of Eovaai in 1736, in which a power-crazed minister seduces the nation away from civic virtue, that Haywood emerges as an anti-Walpole satirist, and even here the underlying ideology is that of a reformist ‘Patriot’ opposition, not the Tory-Jacobite fringe. She pursued this ...”

“... goal, the overall casualty rate was astonishing. Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken ...”

“... disturbed more Victorian readers than any of his peers. We can still register the disconcerting power of Carlyle as an almost Nietzschean anti-moralist; it’s much harder to appreciate why so many found him an inspiringly positive moral guide. Yet for numbers of the earnest young in the 1830s and 1840s, in particular, Carlyle’s writing was a summons to ...”

“... and Thinking, as well as his claim that ‘in the end, philosophy’s business is to safeguard the power of the most elementary words.’ For a nominalist, Heidegger’s favourite words such as physis (Greek for ‘nature’) or Wesen (German for ‘essence’), are no more ‘elementary’ or ‘primordial’ than words such as ‘aubergine’ and ...”

“... than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby got to Labour. The party conference in Liverpool last October was swarming with lobbyists. ‘This is my first Labour conference in years,’ a lobbyist for the energy industry told me at a sponsored drinks reception. ‘There ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... and Charles I was slow to follow Bacon’s advice that favourites must be allowed to fall from power to prevent political damage to the king himself – too slow to save his own head. Yet another role for the favourite, or privado, was that of reformer, for the creaking wheels of early modern administration, and especially the financial wheels, cried out ...”

“... of the DUP founded by the magnificent fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley. Their first child, Jonathan, was born, and Iris was brought low by post-natal depression. She sought relief in her local church, where, one day, she found her faith validated by a lovely coincidence. The speaker told the story of a soldier dying in Galwally hospital, and Iris was ...”

“... the category of homo sacer, brought back into use by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), is more useful here. It designated, in ancient Roman law, someone who could be killed with impunity and whose death had, for the same reason, no sacrificial value. Today, as a term denoting exclusion, it can be seen to apply not only ...”

“... been grateful. In recent times, however, many people have come to regard the United States as a power as dangerous as any other. In reaction to the quietism of the Carter era, American foreign policy has become ultra-activist in both word and deed. This has gone down well with the voters. American public opinion was intensely proud of the successful ...”

“... Europe’s most open and prosperous societies. This fascinating world has been brought to life by Jonathan Israel’s great study, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (2001). But Israel isn’t mentioned in Multitude’s extensive notes. Hardt and Negri’s concern is with rebirth, not historiography. It is the great seer who appeals ...”