“... culture as a foundation for dictatorship. Russia, he wrote, was a country where ‘absolutism had held sway for centuries, where men have been taught to obey and not to think, to prostrate themselves and not assert themselves, to bow and not to shake hands.’ Brzezinski’s thesis challenged Western scholarly wisdom, which depended on the assumption that the ...”

“... promised by the trilogy – reliance on the same inscrutable mechanism could be held a more serious admission of limit, since the coherence of the whole narrative in a sense turns on this deus absconditus. As it happens, Hobsbawm does offer partial explanations of the Great Depression of the 1930s, of the boom of the Golden Age, and even ...”

“... dramatically lowering the cost of US goods compared to those of its main competitors. Employers held real wage growth close to zero for the whole decade. The Reagan Administration slashed corporation taxes. While investment continued to stagnate until 1993, companies shed masses of high-cost, low-profit means of production and labour in order to raise ...”

“... from which the army proposed to shoot down airborne threats to the 2012 Olympics, which were held a mile from Quinn’s old house. The borough teems with estate agents. Private developers are building and marketing flats along the Tower Hamlets stretch of the Regent’s Canal – which not that long ago was a ...”

“... skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence. According to Johnson, he was a remarkable instance of ‘how far impudence may carry ignorance’. Taylor himself – my John Taylor – later became oculist to George III, a job he shared with his brother. The post was ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... opposite of what they mean, and it is this more than anything that makes the new Unionist leader David Trimble look so angry. When John Major told the House of Commons that it ‘would turn his stomach’ to negotiate with Gerry Adams, he meant exactly the opposite, and when this became clear, there was a fuss, but no one really minded too much because ...”

“... We learn a great deal about his visual passions, for the 17th-century Dutch painters, for Caspar David Friedrich (Two Men Contemplating the Moon was part of the inspiration for Waiting for Godot) and, supremely, Cézanne (a late self-portrait attracted the quintessentially Beckettian description ‘overwhelmingly sad. A blind broken old man’). Cronin, on ...”

“... its truth carefully, since so much bad speculation about the genesis of 1984 has been built on it, held up the telling of a story and made the opening of my book hard to digest and contentious. Perhaps I should have ignored all those silly and arbitrary, or at least infinitely reversible, pseudo-Freudian short cuts, or looked at them in the light of Richard ...”

“... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...”

“... to recognise that voters hankered after the New Look or ‘pleasure motoring’ ... Attlee still held to the old public school ideal, common among families with a hereditary commitment to the Empire or the Army, of a society dedicated to service rather than competition for wealth. History was not on his side. Cultural change was rapidly undermining the high ...”

“... the errant young man from the Singapore Stock Exchange, is interviewed in his Frankfurt prison by David Frost, the interview, made by Frost’s production company, broadcast by the BBC at ten this evening. The papers, which have had a preview, are full of Leeson’s self-justifications, but nobody seems to question the propriety of broadcasting such an ...”

“... Gillain, who, you discover, died in 1821 after spending years trying to free a writer unjustly held in the Bastille. Arriving at her tombstone is a confrontation. Even if you weren’t already thinking that every skull stacked here represents a person who also had parents and lovers and wondered what to have for dinner – or that every pair of femurs is ...”

“... country will tolerate such a conservative deal. On the same day as the European elections, Bremen held a vote, which brought another historic defeat for the SPD. Having ruled the city uninterruptedly since 1945, it took only 25 per cent of the vote. The ‘winner’ was the CDU. But it cannot govern alone, which makes the Greens the kingmakers. To the dismay ...”