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“... to become a bishop) acknowledged the clear superiority of Christian doctrine. They claimed (like Thomas More before them) that they were only praising pagan behaviour in order to shame Christians into leading better lives. They assembled carefully selected texts from Classical Stoicism to show that their philosophy was wholly compatible with orthodox ...”

“... has to take in two of the most fiercely independent intellectuals of the 17th century, Hobbes and Spinoza, both of whom challenged accepted verities. Spinoza was ostracised by the Jewish community in Amsterdam for his supposed atheism; Hobbes was denounced in England and beyond for his unrelenting ...”

“... a sort of new-variant liberalism, has claimed a number of prominent victims, including John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, Brian Barry and even Jürgen Habermas.Surprisingly, Gray pays little attention to it, mentioning the idea only as a historical aberration. It poses problems for him, however, since it cuts across his two-face ...”

“... from literature than unites them. In the Renaissance they were barely separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom ...”

“... and a former Baptist, was a wealthy London tobacconist, who left his wife £1685, a small fortune. Thomas Tomkinson, the leader of the second generation, came from a substantial family of Staffordshire tenant-farmers. Big money came into play in the 19th century with the Frost brothers, prosperous brass founders from Derby. But later in the century the sect ...”

“... public attention with pastiche and forgery. Chatterton not only invented the character and work of Thomas Rowley, supposedly a Bristol monk, but also carefully presented it in faded ink on artificially aged parchment, strangely intent on fooling connoisseurs of medieval literature such as Horace Walpole, author of the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle of ...”

“... fast as it is got,  Phyllis, is wholly thine. Mr Treglown shows the dependence of this poem on Hobbes’s ideas; it is not the sort of thing the average seducer wastes his time on. Dying, almost certainly of VD, at the age of 33, Rochester – extravagant to the last – was spectacularly converted to Christianity by Gilbert Burnet. He thus became a moral ...”

“... introductions by Edward Surtz and J.H. Hexter. For Surtz (a Jesuit), More was very much Saint Thomas; for Hexter (a Whig), he was more clearly Sir Thomas, and their rival interpretations have challenged future scholars to find the truth behind the gangly hybrid of the library catalogues – ‘More, ...”

“... thoughts and observations: what the Elizabethans called ‘tablets’. John Aubrey tells us that Hobbes ‘always carried a note booke in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke, or otherwise he might have lost it. He had drawn the designe of the book into chapters, etc., so he knew whereabout it would come ...”

“... Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of ...”

“... Creation to the 4004th year before Christ, and Noah’s flood to the 2349th. And five years later Thomas Stanley published a thorough revision of Diogenes Laertius entitled The History of Philosophy, revealing that he too was a date-freak. He moaned tetchily about traditional ‘anachronisms’, such as Diogenes’ alleged ‘anachronism of one year’ in ...”

“... of his complete works, the second complete works in a century, more than have been accorded either Hobbes or Locke. The story of Winstanley’s life is easily told even if the reasons for his afterlife are less comprehensible. Born in Lancashire in 1609 into a widely ramified Wigan family, he followed a well-worn path to apprenticeship in London. His master ...”

“... Jerusalem relied in biblical times on a municipal waste-combustion site, Gehenna, identified by Hobbes as the real-world model for hell – where the fires would keep burning for as long as there were sinners for incineration. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which unearths utopia in 21st-century Hammersmith, the Houses of Parliament have ...”

“... with a good part of Western drama and the larger part of Western philosophy in his ears. Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and more. Of course, he concedes, he is ‘not insensible’ to ‘an avenue of outrageousness in considering Hollywood films in the light, from time to time, of major works of thought’. But ...”

“... the foreground of legal philosophy ever since. Positivism in its original form, deriving from Hobbes and developed by Bentham and the 19th-century theorist John Austin, holds that law is the command of the sovereign backed by the threat of punishment. This implies that the content of the law can be anything, and that there is no necessary connection ...”