15 quotes
Great men have foibles for which they can be forgiven; including an occasional failure to see where their greatness lies, or what might diminish it.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
The greater pleasures of reading the LRB are thus paid for in a more erratic and limited horizon.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
With the euro, that form of pressure has gone.
Putin’s control of the media is becoming more and more comprehensive. What is left over, that ownership does not ensure, self-censorship increasingly neuters. The Gleichschaltung of parliament and political parties is, if anything, even more impressive.
The – now shop-worn – label of ‘magical realism’ is customarily applied to Márquez’s novels. It has never fitted Vargas Llosa, who disavows the adjective.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
Polemical zeal can produce an fixation on the other side, or sides, of purely hostile intent.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
The first, and most obvious, feature that separates Habermas’s later treatment of law from his original study of the public sphere is its completely unhistorical method.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
The most advanced socialist thought in England is Raymond Williams’ superbly intricate and persuasive work... Any English Marxism will have to measure itself against this landmark in our social thought.
In certain temperaments, intellectual skills and political sympathies have little or no connection. Frege’s anti-Semitism or Wittgenstein’s philo-Stalinism lacked significant leads to their philosophy. Such cases are common enough. Timpanaro was not one of them.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2007)
Historically, Garton Ash belongs to the last levy of the Cold War, a cohort fired by an uncomplicated anti-Communism. His staunchness made him a natural candidate for recruitment to MI6, which propositioned him early on, as it had Ascherson in his time.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
Values – ethical, epistemological, aesthetic – figure in the contests over the field, but they do not define it. Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
It will take time to get a more settled sense of Thompson’s distinction as a historian and a writer. His work spans too many forms for easy judgement, and its aura can be a temptation to short cuts. But a tension between what might be called his nineteenth and his eighteenth century sensibility was certainly at the creative centre of it.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
All hegemonies have their limits, and no policies ever achieve just what they intend. But the salient feature of the present is not that the world at large is out of control, but that it has never been subject to such an extent of control by one power, acting to diffuse and enforce one system, as we see today.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)
Far from participating in a current literary scene agog with vogue and hyperbole, the LRB has kept what is widely perceived as a mandarin aloofness from it. Complicity with the institutions of literature, whether patrons or advertisers, is scarcely a charge that can be made against the paper.
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005)