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“... This disappointingly bland aperçu is supported by a footnote referring readers not to Barth, Gellner or Geertz, and certainly not to such historical revisions as Hugh Brody’s The Other Side of Eden (2001), or Stephen Oppenheimer’s Out of Eden (2003), let alone to such disturbing stuff as Chris Knight’s Blood Relations (1995), or remarkable surveys ...”

“... its dependencies? This is a common idée fixe of intelligentsias, both clerical and secular. As Ernest Gellner indicated (in a 1973 essay on ‘Scale and Nation’), the contemporary obsession with larger scale derives almost entirely from industrialisation and 19th-century urbanisation: that is, from a reading of economics that simply contradicts the ...”

“... ethnic groups. On the liberal left was the philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist Ernest Gellner, a Czech Jew brought up in Prague, who made his way to London just after the end of the war. A sturdy Enlightenment liberal, he pioneered the so-called constructivist view of nationalism, arguing that it was strictly a product of ...”

“... expressed with Powell’s intensity tends to repel historians, or at any rate to unnerve them. Ernest Gellner, for example, says he is ‘allergic to the history of ideas approach, because nationalism as an elaborated intellectual theory is neither widely endorsed, not of high quality, nor of any historic importance’. He argues in Nations and ...”

“... and Its Enemies (1945). A little later, I and many others were convoked to a seminar at which Ernest Gellner, Soros and Popper himself spoke – it was one of Popper’s last appearances in public. He shared his recollections of the outbreak of World War One: it had ruined his school holidays. This was an inheritance light-years away from that of the ...”

“... where almost no other dimension counted. The prevalent explanatory model remains that of the late Ernest Gellner: the ‘modernisation theory’ of Nations and Nationalism, with its powerful bias towards industrialisation and urban-cultural growth as the key factors in nation-building. It explains a lot, but also leaves out a lot – as I pointed ...”

“... role as official greeter, waving the new arrivals through a normally rather suspicious customs. Ernest Gellner, however, always said he was a fraud. Berlin returned the lack of cordiality, perhaps feeling that it was uncomfortable having too many Central European polymaths about the place. (His distaste for George Steiner took something of the same ...”