“... of essays, some of which first appeared in this paper, and are now reprinted in Engagement, on Michael Mann, Norberto Bobbio, Roberto Unger, W.G. Runciman. Andreas Hillgruber, Max Weber, Ernest Gellner, Carlo Ginzburg, Isaiah Berlin, Fernand Braudel and Francis Fukuyama. More recently (LRB, 24 September and 22 October), he has extended himself to ...”

“... that is) has turned into tenners. What a triumph for supply-side economics! The trouble, as Michael Jenkin tells us, is that there have not been enough Steve Buxtons hovering over the rigs in the North Sea. And in the absence of a sufficient number of home-grown entrepreneurs, ministers and civil servants have felt obliged to see if they could force a ...”

“... to wonder whether it is the original author (in the following case, Harriet Monroe) or the editor (Michael Grant) or you yourself who must be getting giddy: ‘While stating nothing, it suggests everything that is in his rapidly moving mind, in a series of shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema. The form, with its play of ...”

“... to arrest and prosecution. Bartlett describes the case of a pseudonymous British man called Michael, whom he interviewed for the book. In his fifties, happily married with a grown-up daughter, Michael protests, quite genuinely it seems, that he is ‘a very ordinary, heterosexual bloke. I was never ...”

“... know, or think they know, most of the answers. In this sense, Barnes both celebrates and mocks the powers of reason. He shows us Intelligence in overdrive, but he also requires us to wonder if it’s chosen the right road. Asking questions is supposed to be a ‘good thing’, to do with being neither fooled nor squashed. But is it not also an affliction, a ...”

“... he touched, the privatisation of the probation service being his worst policy. His successor, Michael Gove, at least recognised the depth of the problems he inherited. In 2015 he said that British justice was the gold standard for those who could pay, but everyone else ‘has to put up with a creaking, outdated system’. He gave emphatic support to ...”

“... epigraph to the dynamic driving Shelley’s literary career’, according to the poet and critic Michael O’Neill, one of our best Shelleyan commentators. The ghostly effects that this penchant for intangibility enables in his poetry – its distinctive repertoire of veils and shadows and hauntings – are eerily magnificent and inimitably his own. No other ...”

“... and group identity, exacerbated by the existence of oil and strategic assets which keep the super-powers waiting anxiously on the side-lines, hesitating to intervene directly, yet too opportunistic, or unsure of their interests, to blow the final whistle. The emergence of Israel as a monopolist nuclear power in the region, as documented by Professor ...”

“... about the Bomb is not an easy task. For anarchists or pacifists the exercise of violence by state powers throughout history has been intrinsically regrettable. But any style of political assessment which weights consequences more heavily than these do must recognise practical connections (sometimes of a surprising kind) between the history of civilised social ...”

“... call of duty. To go back further, before the First World War even most Liberals wanted to curb the powers of the House of Lords, if not to abolish it altogether. And now where are we? The House of Lords has more influence than it used to have. Labour Life Peers are devoted to the House and prouder of their titles than any earl or marquis of ancient ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”

“... Cohen, the model for Justine, at the Scottish School for Girls. From ‘Vintage Alexandria’ by Michael Haag (American University in Cairo Press, $39.95). And then there are the carefully rendered deaths, remarkable in their variety. There is the dying of the furrier Cohen, former patron of Darley’s fragile mistress Melissa, a man who lies in a hospital ...”

“... not written for the films. That is only one of many reasons why I prefer it.’ This separation of powers is categoric and sensible. But ‘The Third Man’ is the title story of the reprinted volume under review, and we are reading it. Some of us, while respecting Greene’s own preference and his many reasons, may well prefer it to the earlier story. Prefer ...”

“... into a large, variegated higher education system is merely to charge them with lacking divine powers. They were right to put central insistence on a massive expansion. The ‘more-will-mean-worse’ school was inept and unrealistic. Entrance standards had risen sharply since the 1930s. Those gaining A-level qualifications were increasing every ...”

“... perhaps unilaterally assumed – a series of titles that implied the delegation of extraordinary powers from the Emperor Gallienus himself. Such stylings were for the benefit of the Greeks Odaenathus ruled, but he began at the same time to employ Persian titles that spoke to a very different audience, to the local Syrians and Arabs who liked being ruled by a ...”