“... Only on this condition can we pretend to think what must separate us from this position.’ He means that our choices, too, are arbitrary, but finds a way of saying so which implies that we, too, are guilty. De Graef takes this line because he is trapped by the assumption of the later de Man that the very idea of a moral choice is unintelligible. Many ...”

“... is intensely vulnerable to natural disruption. Bringing people together in ever larger numbers means that if something goes wrong, everyone suffers. Emanuel takes for granted that if we keep up the population pressure, human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of natural risk. Ever since Malthus warned that population growth was bound to outpace food ...”

“... is to decide which non-spurious generalisations are useful in making the general rules. By no means all of them are useful. For example, it is almost certainly true that there are non-spurious generalisations to be made about the likelihood of certain types of passengers posing a threat to airline security, on the basis of age, gender and ethnic ...”

“... his understanding of the world in which he finds himself is also conventionally princely, which means that it is blinkered, limited and naive. He does not like politicians, whom he regards as too much concerned with short-term objectives, and more interested in partisan success than the good of the country. Nor does he approve of experts and ...”

“... considerations of national security’. Knowing as we do that ‘overriding’ here means that considerations so labelled cannot on security grounds be shared with the public – or even, given Blair’s record in these matters, with other members of the government – we have good reason to see this quite dreadful prospect or else intention as ...”

“... make sense of the senseless. By recording the reality of the shooting, Reynolds affords herself a means of emotional survival. She also provides the rest of us with the human response missing from the police in all these videos: disbelief, rage, grief, the recognition that yet another young black man has been killed. The video transforms an excruciating ...”

“... to attract attention in 1993. The editors think the pace of change at the end of the 20th century means that traditional works of reference are going to have a hard time keeping up. Really they have no idea. 1993 wasn’t so long ago; Bill Clinton was president, a fact that the Columbia editors boast about having been able to include at the last moment (the ...”

“... Bunter’s to run headlong into things, with preposterously beneficial results for all concerned. David Hughes, in his latest novel, takes this trait and turns it on its head: the outcome of Bunter’s intervention in certain notable episodes of the 20th century is very serious indeed. By this account, Bunter is personally responsible for the arrest of ...”

“... is how these are dealt with. The way to deal with them is to take responsibility for them, which means neither denying them nor wallowing in them, but accepting them for what they are: the unintended but foreseeable consequences of any involvement in politics. All politicians with real power have dirty hands, because real politics is a bloody business. The ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... Why start now? If you find that the words start to flow you’ll feel like an idiot, because that means you could have done it long ago and spared yourself a lot of grief. Displacement activities abound, fuelled by the lingering fear that it may already be too late. What if you write the book and it’s no good, or at least not good enough to rescue your ...”

“... better. This does not mean that schools and hospitals should try to be more like supermarkets. It means that they are very different from supermarkets, and that customer choice will not drive progress if the choices are not meaningful ones. Hospital food offers patients two kinds of choice: either to select from a range of options set by a budget they do not ...”

“... things done. And that, of course, just makes things worse, because cutting through the crap also means ignoring the checks and balances that stop the system from blowing up. The result is ‘pluto-populism’. Or to give it another name: Trump.What to do? Wolf’s answer is deceptively simple, though it has many moving parts. The epigraph for his book comes ...”

“... by developing countries ashamed of their backwardness compared to a West that begrudged them the means to compete. In the aftermath of the Indian nuclear test, State Department officials noted that developing countries, many of them India’s rivals, ‘quietly welcomed the Indian demonstration that one of their number could accomplish a technical ...”

“... I am reliably informed, for instance, that practising Polish Catholics resort to abortion as a means of birth control on a large scale. The state, though officially in favour of contraception, does not ensure the availability of contraceptives – the pill is particularly difficult to obtain – but does provide abortion on demand. It is possible that this ...”