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“... and easy extrapolation. Belton is not one of them; he is as fastidious, though not so succinct, as Michael Frayn in his play Copenhagen. Heisenberg said in his memoirs that ‘science is rooted in conversations.’ He seemed to open the door, in the friendliest fashion, for the novelist and the playwright. Schrödinger’s formulation was darker: ‘Science is ...”

“... the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Afterwards, in 1887, he persuaded the police to use their powers under this Act to close brothels in Tower Hamlets. In the words of Charrington’s admiring biographer, ‘our “Valiant-for-Good” began a furious, God-inspired onslaught upon the dens of East London, which actually resulted in the closing of 200 ...”

“... postmodernist concern with language and form continued to highlight the still wider powers, in their age, of commercial, political, or other media interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the ...”

“... were activities hugely dependent on the navies, armies and trading companies of the big imperial powers. The mutiny on the Bounty ruined a mission in imperial botany: Lieutenant William Bligh’s task had been to secure breadfruit trees from Tahiti, then carry them to the Caribbean to provide cheap food for slaves on the sugar-cane plantations. (The trees ...”

“... in Austerlitz W.G. Sebald discusses the bureaucratese of genocide. In emphasising the formative powers of language and the irrational lure of supercharged meanings, Cassirer aligns himself with a familiar principle of cultural critique. But these late thoughts never developed into a sociology. The English translations of the three volumes of The Philosophy ...”

“... The vote​ for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it. A fuck-you can be sent via satirical parties (Iceland’s Best Party won the election for mayor of Reykjavik; Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog Party had a hand in sabotaging Viktor Orbán’s recent anti-refugee referendum), or subversive parties (the Pirates), or grassroots movements turned parties (Podemos ...”

“... painted in the same year that Damien Hirst organised the Freeze exhibition and Jeff Koons created Michael Jackson and Bubbles – the year that Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.For Richter, the seeming inevitability of capitalism only made it a better subject. He has never been an artist who asks questions of the world ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... it. The deposition of Richard II was a sensitive subject. In 1599, and again in 1600, the poet Michael Drayton, in preparing fresh editions of his England’s Heroical Epistles, cautiously excised lines bearing on Richard’s uncrowning and Henry’s usurpation. The edginess surrounding the topic was largely caused by a tract of 1593-94, A Conference about ...”

“... the 1993 Prize, an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each ...”

“... Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of ...”

“... however. Steve Hilton, his friend and chief strategist, is an enthusiast for the transformative powers of capitalism rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an ...”

“... partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the ...”

“... direction or another. This was the view Taylor articulated in the Fifties, now at the peak of his powers, demonstrating that he had won his own struggle for mastery of his professional vocation. ‘What happened next?’ was his favourite question: it forms the subtitle of an autobiographical essay reprinted in a useful new collection of his essays, From ...”

“... hurricanes, That waste yourselves upon the unvexed rock, Find some employment proper to your powers. ‘Always the following wind of history/Of others’ wisdom makes a buoyant air,’ Nower observes at one point. To step outside such sonorous patriarchal discourses is to come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem ...”