“... unlawful – did so ‘spontaneously’, says MacGregor, or orchestrated by MacGregor’s Svengali David Hart, as others say – the new legislation demoralised the union, complicated its affairs, made its leaders look shifty as they tried to evade the sequestrators. But the two main battles owed nothing to it. In the physical battle for control of pits, power ...”

“... of us adopted a proud and sterile form of internal exile, of being at least self-aware in what David Riesman calls ‘the lonely crowd’. While it may be true that there is some honour in refusing the false community on offer, if only for the sake of what Riesman calls the ‘other figures in the landscape – nature itself, the cosmos’, possibly even a ...”

“... officials: a Democrat state assembly member, Alec Brook-Krasny, and a Republican state senator, David Storobin. ‘It took the Greeks two generations to produce one elected politician,’ a local journalist told me proudly. ‘We have two already and they were both born in Russia.’ ‘Russians think they own everything,’ said Bella Rappaport, the woman ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily means of literary supply, and the task is then to make peace, if you can, between the warring truths that come at you from reality. Lillian invented new and bold ways of doing this by dramatising people’s motives, rather than merely describing them, or by ...”

“... Oliver’s overtures anyway, for both were committed to parliamentary reform by constitutional means. The government would not understand that, though he had no respect for corrupt figures of authority, Hone had a great deal more respect for the constitution than did the government itself or the judiciary. Over and over again, the crown and the judges ...”

“... campaigns in history’.What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria: mangled pipes and wires, the ganglia of shorn rebars and masonry, homes cut in half, exposing their foundations like uprooted trees. Somehow there seems to ...”

“... to live within constant striving. It is hard to live within the word ‘degenerative’, which means that, however I strive, I do not win.Of course everyone is striving all their life. And none of us will win against mortality. But there is a difference between striving to (say) learn ancient Greek or do the vacuuming and striving to pay microscopic ...”

“... his conscience clean while others did the dirty work: it required determined resistance to war by means of direct action. Pacifism – as well as poetry – led him to Herbert Read, Britain’s most famous anarchist, and he absorbed many of Read’s ideas. The state became the primary target of his political critique. Drawing on psychoanalysis, he argued that ...”

“... and political one.An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man ...”

“... of ‘free trade unions’ prescribed by KOR: Kuron’s vision of ‘free association’ as a means of regenerating the Party from outside was as radical as anything dreamed up by the Czech intellectuals. To have held back from such attractions would probably have required more wisdom and courage than Solidarity’s leaders or followers ...”

“... of the correlation of forces: while Khrushchev could have chosen global war, he did not have the means to protect his ships at sea or his military forces in Cuba. Once it was absolutely clear that Kennedy meant to do what he said – remove the missiles one way or another – Khrushchev was quick to see he had to give in. The big secrets of the American half ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... the resurrection of what we think – even wish – safely consigned to the past, becomes the main means by which the novella conducts its ambiguous meditations on how modern Scotland should regard its violent history. The novella has been read by some of Hogg’s critics as a deliberate attempt to undo the decencies of Waverley, as a story intended to restore ...”