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“... to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the paper against A.J. Ayer, John Gross and Colin Welch – with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics ...”

“... never been able to see why high consumption and brotherly love should be incompatible.’ A.J. Ayer condemned him for having an idea of socialism that ‘resembles present-day America’, while another critic sneered that there was ‘a jukebox struggling to get out of him’. Yet so far from seeking sameness, his book can be read as a path-breaking ...”

“... his life, and which he was convinced was evidence of a reality beyond the visible world. As A.J. Ayer said of him, ‘his mind has displayed a religious rather than a scientific bent,’ while Malcolm Muggeridge felt he was ‘all antennae and no head’. The follies of his old age contributed to the posthumous eclipsing of his reputation – it is hard now ...”

“... that based on the infinity of so-far unfalsified theories? Here the verdict must be mixed. A.J. Ayer once objected: ‘Why should a hypothesis which has failed the test be discarded unless this shows it to be unreliable: that is, except on the assumption that having failed once it is likely to fail again?’ This would smuggle in the principle of induction ...”

“... mix was made even more unstable by the manoeuvring of SOE and local landowners, who struck A.J. Ayer, an SOE officer in the city, as little changed since the 15th century. In Italy the Protocols of Rome, agreed in December 1944 by the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (CLNAI), the proxy government of the northern cities, and the new ...”

“... cultural commentators – rather than media-friendly academics such as Hugh Trevor-Roper or A.J. Ayer. The very enterprise of comparative historical sociology, magnificent though it is in its tireless attempt to find pattern and explanation across societies and millennia, is bound to take an aerial view, and perhaps that, too, helped distance Gellner from ...”

“... through it – and there cannot be many these days – with an impression of total confusion; A.J. Ayer was ‘an engaging man ... in whose company I delighted’, but his work was unstable and confusing, and because he had a near-death experience, it is impossible to tell, says Johnson, if he died believing in God or not. But how much better, in Johnson’s ...”

“... by Amit Chaudhuri and Romesh Gunesekera, reflections and memoirs and poems by everyone from A.J. Ayer to Fiona Pitt-Kethley. We often used to argue about Pitt-Kethley’s super-sexually frank work in the office. Karl was a believer and said something very useful about her work: ‘When people are shocked by something,’ he told me, ‘they never admit to ...”

“... Anne’s College, Oxford, where she attended lectures by Isaiah Berlin and had classes with A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch; most fatefully, a sojourn at the Sorbonne, where, like Audrey Hepburn pixie-ing through the new philosophy of Empathicalism in Funny Face, she met – oh, enough roll call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or ...”

“... of a ‘science of pure being’ was preposterous and self-contradictory, and agreed with A.J. Ayer’s argument, in Language Truth and Logic, that so-called ‘metaphysical propositions’ are unverifiable and literally meaningless. But Ayer’s inference that metaphysics should be ‘eliminated’ and replaced with ...”