“... another can be the crux of litigation on which billions are at stake. For this reason, inflation may be the UK’s most controversial national statistic. It’s certainly the most consequential. It moves markets and it determines monetary policy: it moves markets because it determines monetary policy. But none of that is a price collector’s immediate ...”

“... trilby. Harbourside deer. Memories occupy my mind like bright lights in an urban void: symbols you may not understand when I report them; yet a word in earnest may at times transcend ... Thousands of miles from you, I slip my clothes off. Bed-lamp lit, these sheets look fresh as a new envelope. I’ll turn the hot tap till ...”

“... and his nagging wife – We keep the templates safe in our bank vaults. But as I write this down I may uncover That ring of majesty I know is stored In words, and by retrieving it I may Dredge cool epillia from the image-hoard – Thus while each word remains I will discover The source from which the magic rays are sent And ...”

“... distinguish a message made of logs: ‘Return to the frontier or all is lost, though in time some may reap the benefit and glory of a frozen attitude.’ My mind was made up. We would start for Illinois that very day. Have you considered firecrackers? The deft music contained therein assuages all contenders. Those who arrive last at the party receive the most ...”

“... some years ago; the bitter taste still lingers on, and I have a grudging sense that Jane Fairfax may not be quite as thin a dish of gruel as that. Instead it has an unappealing, mixed-up wrongness of flavour. It wants to be both like Jane Austen (to substitute for the real thing) and to revise Jane Austen (to be a real thing itself). Aiken disastrously fails ...”

“... be honest, without pretensions; the poetic problem, or part of it, that to strip away all colour may leave only a faint wash. Because the language is so neutral, it is the form in these lines which eye and ear find themselves debating. A slight awkwardness can add charm and authenticity: but when I come to the tenth line, which has the right number of ...”

“... us now, when the axis of global economic power is tilting away from the West. Whatever else it may have been, the Cold War was a family quarrel among Western ideologies. If it is true that the Soviet side lost, it is also true that Western civil societies did not win. For the ending of the Cold War at once removed the legitimacy which they acquired from ...”

“... confusion of university teaching and gunnery instruction. Drilling the principles of Greek grammar may be appropriate to the methods of the army classroom. But to help young people explore for themselves the strange, foreign cultures of Greece and Rome is an activity which ought to bear as little resemblance as possible to explanations of the workings of a ...”

“... including the ‘fear’, as Tom Wilkie writes in Perilous Knowledge, ‘that the project may open the door to a world peopled by Frankenstein’s monsters and disfigured by a new eugenics.’ Wilkie, a physicist turned science journalist, provides a lucid, serviceable primer on the technical developments that have made the Human Genome Project ...”

“... is better entitled than most powerful people to a contented old age. The sadness of that portrait may after all be no deeper than it is proper for any sensitive person of 80 to feel as he surveys what seems to have been an unprecedentedly greedy and uncivilised community. This interesting autobiography is in the end, like most autobiographies, an unsatisfying ...”

“... with its gleaming, sterilised surfaces, its mechanical wheelchairs and pain-killing drugs – may successfully serve as the subject-matter for poetry. Sissman’s great strength was his self-mocking sense of humour. The man who could see the cancer within him as a ‘tissue of fabrications’, or a row of surgical instruments as a ‘service for ...”

“... by a much more conservative figure as Khrushchev was before him, then Western disappointment may well mimic the previous disenchantment with détente. Conversely, if revolt were to break out in one of the countries of Eastern Europe which espouses glasnost too enthusiastically, the pressures on Gorbachev to intervene ...”

“... route from Oxford to Rome, he dismisses private judgment with a humorous metaphor. Catholics, too, may use it, but ‘they use it ultimately to supersede it; as a man out of doors uses a lamp in a dark night, and puts it out when he gets home. What would be thought of his bringing it into his drawing room?’ Yet he was aware of an anxiety that his own habit ...”

“... adult population of France who, last spring, voted twice to elect a President (on 24 April and 8 May) and twice to elect a Parliament (on 5 and 12 June). In September they voted in local elections, and in November the referendum on the future of New Caledonia took place. Many of them are now thinking about how they will vote in next year’s municipal and ...”

“... Things do happen, things do get done and said in the stories, even though sometimes people may be talking at cross-purposes at times, or seemingly to no good purpose. KB: I’m interested in those stories which appear in different forms in different collections. Are they different versions of one story or different stories? RC: I feel they’re ...”