Tony Crosland famously talked of wanting to live in "a more colourful and civilised country" and stressed the political importance of "happiness and cultural endeavour; the cultivation of leisure, beauty, grace, gaiety, excitement, and of all the proper pursuits, whether elevated, vulgar or eccentric, which contribute to the varied fabric of a full private and family life".
His popularity sat uneasily with those who see poetry as the proper pursuit of an especially brilliant and soulful elite.
The White House scandal demonstrates once again that unrestrained covert activities threaten both constitutional government at home and the proper pursuit of American interests abroad.
Basically, it was built around the study of dialectic (the skill of accurate verbal reasoning), the proper pursuit of which, he believed, enables misconceptions and confusions to be stripped away and the nature of underlying truth to be established.
From 1847 to 1854 he was a Privatdozent at the University of Heidelberg; he resigned when he came up against the "official philosophy" of German universities, which held that speculation about consciousness and similar topics was not the proper pursuit of the university.
It is an evolution, driven by breath-snatching market-rate rents and scant supply, that partisans on opposite sides of the landlord-tenant divide see either as entirely proper pursuit of procedure or as grinding, often baseless legal harassment.
Are those powers then, which being intended for the erudition of the world are, like air and light, the world's common property, to be taken from their proper pursuit to do the commonplace drudgery of governing a single state, a work which my be executed by men of an ordinary stature, such as are always & everywhere to be found?
(That's a list that needless to say puts Proudfoot and Stout in rather distinguished company!) More than the other two works, however, Religious Experience has informed my most basic attitudes about the point and proper pursuit of the shared enterprise we call the study of religion.
The latest antics of Femen at a French Muslim conference allegedly discussing wife-beating and proper womanly pursuits are a case in point.
Jeffersonian Republicans "worried that too much commercial involvement would detract from the proper agricultural pursuits of the American people, tempting them into a love of luxury and corrupting their sensibilities"; Hamiltonian Federalists argued that a thriving commercial sector was a necessary and civilizing engine of progress.
It'll take some practice to determine the proper angle of pursuit.
