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“... In the Republic, Socrates and Plato’s brothers wander out of Athens and walk down to the port of Piraeus, leaving the city behind them. After quickly demolishing the prevailing views of justice in Athenian society, Socrates proceeds to dream of another city, a just city governed by philosophers whose souls would be oriented towards the Good. The familiar objection to Plato, that the ideal of the philosophical city is utopian or impossible to realise, is fatuous ...”

“... In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche gives what Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster call a ‘fascinating short interpretation’ of Hamlet, from which they take their title. They don’t think much of the book up to that point: it’s when he gets to Hamlet, they argue, that Nietzsche wakes up. This isn’t a view everyone would share, but it’s of a piece with the many assured judgments they make about Hamlet in the play with the most canonically self-doubting hero ...”

“... difficult to explain; perhaps I can edge towards what I mean by analogy. In 2004, the philosopher Simon Critchley – who has appeared on the INS platform – added a preface to the second edition of his book Very Little … Almost Nothing (1997), a study of Blanchot, Beckett and Wallace Stevens: Events circled around my father’s illness with lung ...”

“... The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left. Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position.* For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed ...”

“... For God’s sake leave me alone!’ ‘Why the hell should I?’ ‘What’s it to me anyway?’ That sort of unilateral declaration of indifference must be the starting point of nearly all family quarrels, and plenty of political catastrophes as well. ‘Why should I always give way to other people? Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But eventually the question will be turned sarcastically back on you ...”

“... things, how to conjure up a ‘black hole’ convincingly on stage.) One of the reasons I’m glad Simon Reynolds gives so much space to this earlier period (in his outsize but periodically acute history of Glam) is that it furnishes real clues to later Bowie, the Bowie of superstar myth, the master manipulator, one move ahead of everyone else. In his 1975 ...”

“... Picarda, a Liberal, though I’m fairly certain it was said by Heseltine’s old friend Julian Critchley. These speeches take an enormous amount out of him. He was desperate to prove that his heart attack in the summer of 1993 was caused by a blockage rather than a weakness in the heart itself. However, he took his doctors’ advice and skipped his annual ...”