Twenty or thirty years ago, when British television could still lay claim to being the least bad in the world, Bryan Magee was a familiar figure on the small screen. Dapper and avuncular, he engaged philosophers in one-on-one chats on such matters as the existential moment, the politics of aesthetics and post-Chomskyan linguistics. It sounds weird but the shows looked weirder. For Magee quizzed the likes of Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams while sitting on a Dralon-covered sofa. Come to think of it,

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