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“... impact of one or two key developers. The contrasts are certainly astounding. Houston has no zoning laws, and the mood of planning laissez-faire is both exhilarating and melancholy. Something, like nothing, happens anywhere. The downtown area once contained the mansions of the rich, but they have all gone; some of those baking, dusty parking-lots were once ...”

“... in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of discovering some historical laws of circumstantial determinism. In another, it has been resurrected as psychohistory, which seeks greater intellectual respectability by becoming evidentially more sensational, probing the intimate details of men’s inner lives as lived in their bedrooms and ...”

“... eliminate from consideration all exceptional cases. But if generalisations approximating to laws of nature are to be built up from empirical observations, the variations implicit in ‘exceptional cases’ may be of the utmost significance. After all, why should the changing class structure of Middlesbrough resemble in any way the changing class ...”

“... common discursive universe, grounded in what Berlin has recently described as ‘universal ethical laws’. For this reason, Anderson complains – with rare limpness, for he’s uneasy with theory that’s abstracted from circumstance, and forgets that socialists have also made the same sort of assumption – Berlin is too monist, or too parochially ...”

“... the dream logic of an alternative world, parallel to the known, but somehow bent in its physical laws. The presence of the past, so vividly summoned, in colour, smell and sensation, is always painful. In the Kingdom of Air tips from achingly funny suburban farce to the terrible image of a young woman imprisoned in the basement by her father, a wooden box, or ...”

“... would dissolve into a haze of signifiers. Not all of this would be music to the ears of, say, John Fiske, whose essay ‘Opening the Hallway’ upbraids the maestro for coming down too hard on Michel Foucault. Hall has been engaged for some time in a precarious balancing-act between socialism and Post-Modernism, class and race, epistemic realism and ...”

“... virgins or whores.Fair enough: the defenders of the faith need some respite from maintaining the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant reformed religion established by law. God, then, returns the favour by being on hand to bless or chide when a decision is being made about the suitability of this or that late adolescent broodmare ...”

“... The historical role of Parliament is as a brake on precipitate action, a mechanism for delaying laws and change until they seem likely to command consent and benefit the polity. Delay was also thought to minimise the risk of subsequent repeal. In 1864 Gladstone claimed that was why ‘we always progress, never retrace our steps.’This was a conservative ...”

“... classics of liberal philosophy and political theory – from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice – can’t realise their own putative ambitions without reckoning with the latent radicalism in their projects. For several years Ypi has been a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, an ...”

“... anniversary of a school that one of Luther’s followers wrested away from the monastery of St John in 1529 and renamed the Johanneum. Great figures of the German Enlightenment had taught or studied there; C.P.E. Bach and Telemann had been music masters during the 18th century. All this is to make clear that my image of my father before I knew him is of a ...”

“... material about ‘the corrupt nexus at the heart of the Russian state’. He cites a report by John Beyrle, the US ambassador to Moscow, who wrote that ‘police and MVD collect money from small businesses while the FSB collects from big businesses.’ But even when they amiably divide up the turf, the members of various agencies are doing so for their own ...”

“... soon looked up. According to one estimate, he came to own 50,000 acres in County Kerry alone. John Aubrey estimated his rental income at its height at £18,000 a year – perhaps £27 million in today’s money. In a nice closing of the causal circle, Irish land capitalised the rest of Petty’s career, including the projects in political arithmetic that ...”

“... years to get them into a form with which he was satisfied. His principal discoveries – the three laws of motion and the explanation of gravity and planetary motion in terms of universal attraction – were simple and elegant and easy to understand, and one of his early drafts was written methodo populari, as he put it, to ensure that it ‘could be widely ...”

“... shaming. ‘I denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... We learn what W.V. Quine wrote about the word ‘solstice’ in a personal letter to Sen, what John Sparrow said about the Good Samaritan parable over dinner at All Souls, and why Piero Sraffa used to rub his chin when chatting to Wittgenstein at Trinity. No doubt each of these tales forms a filament, however frail, in the pendant damask of our human ...”