“... not novelised philosophy but a philosophical novel: a work that analyses experience by literary means, presenting each of its moments as if it were self-contained. (Sartre dwelt on Camus’s use of the passé composé, which, he argued, treats experience as a congeries of isolated impressions, of the kind once proposed by ...”

“... patterns the acquisition of power on the accumulation of capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The imperialist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Cromer looked at Egypt and saw India, Rhodes looked at South Africa and saw the world. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ he said. So it is today: Afghanistan leads to ...”

“... so stubbornly hostile to T.S. Eliot and to Modernism in general.Yet in reality his youth was by no means untroubled. The Sassoons were descended from the great Jewish merchants of Baghdad. Siegfried’s great-great-grandfather Sasson Ben Saleh was the last Prince of the Captivity at the Caliph’s court, and before moving to England the family had been the ...”

“... culture with ‘an ongoing global process of political liberation from Western rule’, as David Murphy puts it. To drive this point home, representatives of Swapo from what is now Namibia, the African People’s Union from Zimbabwe and the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress from South Africa were invited, and marched in the opening ceremony, a street ...”

“... translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz Ziegfeld’s wife. She continued as a drama critic at ...”

“... environment can be seen as a giant museum, exhibiting the decrepit and shabby remains of prior means of capital accumulation along with obsolete visions of society.’ In his second, he makes Liverpool a test case for this claim. The city’s explosive growth followed the construction of a deep-water port in 1715. Soon it was a centre of the British ...”

“... Blackheath, the list of architects’ self-designed houses is long: Peter Moro, Brian Meeking, David Branch (whose elegant, Miesian case study-style house has now been demolished), Leo Rubinstein, Paul Tvrtkovic, Ray Smith and Ronald Coleman. Most of these were deadpan little houses, in brick with exposed concrete frames, often with small windows onto the ...”

“... were preventing the private sector taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management ...”

“... but the mood is nostalgic and the metre is refined.’ She concluded: ‘Somehow or other, by fair means or foul, and in the middle of our worst century so far, we have produced a magnificent poet.’ She liked the idea, she wrote to Lowell, that the confessional poems ‘are all about yourself and yet do not sound conceited’. In 1960, after reading some ...”

“... underwrite the discourse of ‘opportunity’ is an uphill struggle, however, not least because it means departing from some of the commonsense axioms about human agency and fairness that we all draw on in our everyday social interactions. We may be forced by the evidence to acknowledge that our society is not in any genuine sense a meritocracy, but at the ...”

“... most banks in the Middle East, Al Rajhi Bank and KFH are ‘sharia-compliant’ businesses, which means simply that they try to abide by the evolving body of rules known as the sharia – ‘the path to the headwater’ – which govern the lives of Muslims. The sharia serves mostly as a guide to personal conduct, though some rules are drafted into the ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

“... was the real cause of Mandelstam’s first arrest a day or two after the face-slapping incident: David had faced Goliath with eight stony couplets in his sling. The Moscow apartment was searched by the secret police, Mandelstam was taken to their headquarters in the Lubianka Prison, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of exile in Cherdyn, where, in a ...”

“... and be more or less than a soldier, you cannot easily forget old friends and you cannot make war a means of self-enrichment. He is also critical of EO’s treatment of its personnel. He has argued that they were not always looked after in Angola and that the company might have offered better terms of employment, considering the dangers of the work. EO is ...”

“... Conference, and that they all occupy what the press has termed ‘the middle ground’, which means that they don’t believe in very much. As one of their spokespersons put it, ‘we want to bring together the ideas of both the rightist and the leftist politicians to build this nation ... we are neither in favour nor against the military ...”