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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of having a thin conception of society – unless by society we mean social democracy rather than laws, schools, churches, families and firms. As Rodgers points out, even Hayek’s most influential student, Margaret Thatcher, when she stated that ‘there is no such thing as society,’ added a rider regarding the irreducibly social and institutional nature ...”

“... it in the process or cutting loose from it altogether. The result is stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga written while he was completing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a man has a vast grudge against is the man’s determinant’. Something similar seems to be true of ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”