“... a passport to a conference in Paris, or of befriending a Western foreigner, was to visit a certain Major Kowalski now and then and invent some harmless platitudes – cheap at that price. A few of my friends admitted this and joked about it. Others kept it delicately unsaid. They were reluctant informers, not professional spooks out to entrap me, and knowing ...”

“... weren’t necessarily full-time or jobs for the duration of the project), but only a few of the major contracts have gone to British firms. Tunnelling contracts have been awarded to the UK’s BAM Nuttall, Balfour Beatty and Kier Group, but also to Ireland’s John Sisk & Son, Austria’s Alpine BeMo and the Spanish firms ...”

“... The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change (1999) and more briefly in John Gray’s The Immortalisation Commission.* Preserving Lenin’s body from further decay is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge: every 18 months the body is bathed in a potassium acetate-glycerin solution and careful maintenance done on the accumulating skin ...”

“... idea is simple, however, and it’s one on which Johnston finds ‘massive consensus, across the major religions’, which harbour correct ethical ideas in spite of their endemic idolatry. Acquiring a good will is a matter of anatta as above – complete dissolution of the selfish local self. A good will is ‘a disposition to absorb the legitimate interests ...”

“... to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel about the nuclear family in the age of nuclear jitters, took this approach about as far as it could go. As its cover suggests, The Black Veil finds Moody reaching past his immediate literary fathers to his anguished ...”

“... pain’, though he adds that, if it is true that ‘classical utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mill used “pleasure” ... to include achieving what one desired’ and vice versa, then ‘the difference between classical utilitarianism and utilitarianism based on interests disappears.’ In fact, achieving what one desires is not always ...”

“... the landowning class, and that most of the real fighting took place. Of course, since 1603 any major political transference of power had to be effective in both countries, and so English Jacobitism, less widespread than Scottish though no less deeply held, in many cases, was vital to success. For this reason, the only important Jacobite rising was the ...”

“... expected to be strictly apolitical; the independence of the judiciary is considered sacrosanct. John Rawls went to extraordinary lengths to imagine an ‘original position’ in which everyone would be capable of agreeing on the principles of social justice: in it, each of us would be ignorant of our own social status and effectively function as an outside ...”

“... of course, is still employed to legitimise Saudi rule. As guardians of Islam’s holy places and major financial contributors to Islamic institutions all over the world, the Al Saud now enjoy a quasi-caliphal role, regarding themselves as non-titular heads of an increasingly politically-conscious pan-Islamic community. This gives them a moral influence ...”

“... at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no strings attached.) Edward Kamau Brathwaite is also familiar with that circle, having carried off a Cholmondley Award in this country and a ...”

“... doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to solitary complacency. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander has recently unfolded a contrariety in Chapter 26 of the Book of Proverbs: Answer not a tool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Each of these ...”

“... users, yet most people prefer to read about murder, volcanic eruptions, set-piece battles and major epidemics than do or be done to at first hand. Some people would rather read about cooking and eating than spend their lives in the kitchen. The flaw, a man with a six-inch moth on his face will argue, lies in the ease with which this method spirits me from ...”

“... the camaraderie of the laboratory, for there is no experimental work. Which is why the career of John von Neumann, who did do new work, and is the nearest thing the book has to a hero, is not typical. When he wanted to build a computer at the Institute he met resistance: Harold Cherniss, a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, became an Institute ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... with its evocation both of journalism and the advertising hoarding, but he stops short of such a major claim. To see Beardsley in this way, however, does little to explain his position in art history, which is much more complex and idiosyncratic than the idea that he influenced Kandinsky or Picasso by uncluttering the black-and-white print. In fact some of ...”