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“... is such that it triggers his tacit knowledge that strapped objects (for the purposes of the laws of physics) are indeed objects. Since our tacit knowledge of the world is often in conflict with our explicit theoretical commitments, abstract argument is often insufficient to bring it to the fore. Thought experiments, by focusing the imagination on ...”

“... admiration for D.H. Lawrence as well as Hitler, Bradford has brought himself up to speed on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... told what the half-naked men ‘clubbing together’ under inadequate rugs are up to. True to the laws of prurience, Greenwood closed his third instalment by implying that he could easily reveal ‘horrors . . . infinitely more revolting than anything that appears in these pages’. The many scholars who examined ‘A Night’ before Koven have been slow to ...”

“... but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines.’ At least until recently nearly all Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, ...”

“... was locked up came under German jurisdiction, and Lucia, classified as unworthy of life under Nazi laws governing the mentally defective, could have been murdered. Joyce moved heaven and earth to get her to safety, but died before he could do so. He had fled from one form of nationalism in Ireland, and was now up against an infinitely more noxious version of ...”

“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us that the ...”

“... when the Nazis discovered that the Wittgensteins had Jewish ancestors and so, by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, were suddenly liable to have their considerable wealth confiscated. How this self-invented dynasty dealt with and survived the loss of what Ludwig would call, in his philosophical writings, their ‘form of life’, and what this return of a ...”

“... Loi Taubira’s second article in the name of ‘parallelism’ (with the dubious logic that both laws attempted to mandate an ‘official history’). In his foreword to Edouard Glissant’s Mémoires des esclavages, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin writes that ‘today France wants to look into the face of this tragedy that has left so many ...”

“... Fox, while lesser opposition members, on the balcony of Brooks’s club, hold up a ‘New Code of Laws’ over a tray of severed heads with the caption ‘Killed off for the Public Good’. Meanwhile, across the street, outside the Tory White’s club, two gentlemen have been hanged from a lamp-post by the English armée du people, and one of them is ...”

“... and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation of economic activity, administratively defined corporate policy and spurious expertise. Law Number XXXI: ‘The optimum committee has no members.’ Law Number MLVII: ‘Two-thirds of the ...”

“... democracy. If the Communist regime refused this logic and clung to its old ways, the laws of social science would condemn it to economic stagnation. Either way America had nothing to fear.In his cool-headed history, Schism, Paul Blustein takes issue with both these interpretations. So too do Bob Davis and Lingling Wei in their more journalistic ...”

“... who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British public as the enemy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public show ...”