“... a novel representation of the culture of distance. It has led to much impatience, but then it may eventually be seen that the systematic exhaustion of patience has been part of the inner history of these events. The long, slow approach to the islands was a material reality. But then: to go all that way and do nothing? To hear those discussions night after ...”

“... aversion to the Eye certainly seems to have been different from the conventional dislike. It may have touched off fears of a deep and dangerous conspiracy against himself. ‘ “Is your aim to smash Private Eye?” he was asked. “No,” Goldsmith snarled, leaning across and jabbing his finger at me. “I only want them to be more ...”

“... Jewish, too. This discovery brightens Tom up. He now knows he is Jewish. He will wear the Star of David, like that on his Uncle John’s war grave, he will learn Hebrew and support the state of Israel. Tom has, at last, got a general idea, a myth, into his pragmatic head – a tribal and political idea to warm up his bleak sense of duty. Tom is more ...”

“... world wars. Is the Kadavergehorsam explanation adequate? That depends on what we want to know. It may tell us why German soldiers fought on tenaciously even when the war was self-evidently lost, or why economic life continued to function even under severe aerial bombardment. It may explain individual atrocities, such as the ...”

“... to obviate identification. Here is the chance for New York’s homeliest girl. Her misfortune may make a fortune right away. Somewhere in the archives of the Mirror, a masked Rosa Travers gazes out in muted triumph. Some time later, the new-model Rosa would, I suppose, have been unveiled. Unless the carbolic acid caused a third-degree burn, the scalpel ...”

“... what innumerable doctors have had to say about it. This historical prudence is welcome, because it may well be that hysteria – this ‘Proteus’ as Thomas Sydenham called it in the 17th century – is never anything other than what we say about it, and that hysterics adapt themselves to doctors’ expectations and theories, thereby confirming them. This was ...”

“... service personnel had imperial backgrounds.) That such activity was reviled in mainland Britain may, perversely, have aided its development; if it had been more generally accepted it could have been monitored and controlled. But the existence of MI5, SIS and GCHQ was formally admitted only in the 1980s, and Aldrich gives several examples of GCHQ’s hiding ...”

“... philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and David Bloor. If Latour’s work has caused particular distress, it is at least in part because of his flagrantly cosmopolitan style: witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally ...”

“... morituri whose deaths might seem as edifying as a snuff film. Nonetheless, low brutes though they may have been (among Roman elites, the term ‘gladiator’ could be used as an insult – i.e. ‘thug’ or ‘scum’), gladiators occupied a polyvalent position in Roman elite culture. They were scum who could die like heroes, the lowest of the low, but they ...”

“... of further questions or second trips. Between the lines of your unyielding story another narrative may awaken and begin to stand up. And that will be the story you take home: the unending story of the story itself. You’d do well to snap your pencil and walk away at that point. Exhaustion can be a wise counsellor. But sometimes the second story not only ...”

“... away, but finessed for a world beyond the raucous, claustrophobic clubs they were used to. This may be the moment subculture jettisoned its prefix, and began to infiltrate the culture at large.The jacket covers of two of these new Beatles books feature the classic mid-1960s Fab Four: no longer buttoned up inside matching suits, but individually tailored in ...”

“... that what Colombia needs is not new laws but the will to apply them. There are signs that the will may be developing. Extensive frauds have been uncovered in the social security system, and in the public services of Colombia’s main port, Barranquilla. The newspapers are exposing corruption with more determination than they have shown for a long time. Even ...”

“... economies’. ‘The magic of the price system gets thousands of people to co-operate so that we may buy a pencil for a trifling sum.’ It was calculated in the 1950s that it would cost a do-it-yourself addict about fifty dollars to make a single wood-cased pencil. As late as 1771, at the beginning of the decade of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and of James ...”

“... were zipping through an amendment a minute. This is undeniably high productivity – which may have been just what Mrs Thatcher intended when she put the heat on them. But it is hard to argue that legislative Stakhanovism on this scale is evidence of, or even compatible with, the work of an effective revising chamber. Moreover, Donald Shell and his ...”

“... that he has brought the devils to Loudun, at least metaphorically, in rousing passions which he may not share but which he is pleased to have roused. But he hasn’t. He is not a sorcerer, only a man not trying to be an angel, and it is this acknowledgement which allows him to suffer and die with impeccable courage, accepting none of the charges against him ...”