“... have made our problems worse. A.H. Halsey and Brian Barry in their essay in the Skidelsky, and David Marquand in his, take this on, seeking to identify collective actions and provisions that can mitigate the worst effects of the free market. By denying, in a chillingly offguard moment, the very existence of such a thing as society, she has at least allowed ...”

“... to literary examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction ...”

“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”

“... to be taken seriously and relying on a single performance by Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe or David Steel to give them whatever credibility they could earn. It was Labour that faced the real problem. Defeat for the leadership – often following a bitter row – saddled it with policies unacceptable to its own MPs and profoundly unattractive to the ...”

“... in Bangkok when the American actor Fred Forrest would spend the evenings laboriously changing David Hare’s dialogue for Saigon, Year of the Cat. When I asked him why, he said: ‘Can you imagine Marlon sticking to the text?’ Forrest had been in Apocalypse Now, and had watched Brando climbing palm trees in the Philippines and throwing coconuts at ...”

“... priggishness I dislike so intensely.’ Poets with whom she became involved – George Barker and David Gascoyne, for example – are sadly unrecognisable now as the vibrant young bucks she saw or imagined half a century ago. (She had a sharp eye, though, for dirty nails, mean and common facial expressions and weak chins.) So the literary, whoever they ...”

“... half-crust. (“That bread alone was worth the journey,” they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.)’ This provoked disdain and wrath on the Letters page, and a response from Angela in the shape of a postcard from Austin, Texas. On the front was a picture of a violently steaming saucepan. On the back ...”

“... book. The ‘mélange of toughness, independence, enterprise, courage and good humour’ which David Wright admired when he met Macaulay in the Fifties, reads like an uncorroborated report, and, ironically, the most lasting image is Wright’s description of an unattended bicycle, a familiar sight outside the London Library during the ...”

“... be: as fearlessly investigative as Harry Evans’s Sunday Times, as intellectually stimulating as David Astor’s Observer, as full of human interest as the Daily Telegraph. It wasn’t clear who would do the dirty work of actually getting the paper out, but surely it couldn’t fail. The Independent’s offices were, and are, in the City, and I was struck by ...”

“... In his brilliant account of collapsing Yugoslavia, A Paper House, Mark Thompson meets a leader of the Vojvodina Ruthenes called Professor Julijan Tamas. Since 1989 this tiny people has been struggling back into political existence. In 1991 they managed to stage the first World Congress of Ruthenes and just before that the first Bible in Ruthenian had finally appeared ...”

“... Thrillers are routinely deemed ‘chilling’, as though our feelings of fear and cold are in some way interchangeable. Yet outlandishly low temperatures alone cannot account for the tremendous success of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, even if it does open with a bleak Copenhagen December, and go on to describe a still colder place – Greenland, covered by an icecap up to a mile thick, with a climate so severe that if you need to drop your trousers to relieve yourself, you must first light a Primus stove under a blanket to prevent instant frost-bite ...”

“... spared no effort at consolation with other ‘rare boys’. Not all were a success: ‘9 March, David Young! 11 March, D.Y. no good.’ He was dogged by bad luck. He had only to get off with a trooper and either he or the trooper at once fell ill. But trooper Paxton (nephew of the Chatsworth gardener) was a ‘bold, audacious Blackguard such as I ...”

“... shows quite clearly that the intended target is myself) is mostly directed against the work of Dr David McKnight, who has repeatedly demonstrated that Lévi-Strauss’s generalisations about an Australian aboriginal group known as the Wik-mungkan simply do not fit the evidence. It is impossible to judge the utility or disutility of Lévi-Strauss’s argument ...”

“... cosy duopoly no less riddled than Fleet Street with high-cost restrictive practices, as David Owen has recently pointed out) breaks down under the impact of the satellite systems that will deliver far more channels to the home. The essential value of the press remains unaltered whether it is produced by steam, hot metal, electronics, or by the ...”

“... for a long time to come. Some of those who were content with the Falklands war – such as David Owen – have baulked at the American attack: it is often more convenient to criticise the aggression of foreigners than that of your own nation, and Libya has been an American show, a Reagan spectacular, with the British input amounting to no more than an ...”