“... time-scales, arise within any movement set to challenge hegemonies from the margins. This may be peculiarly true for women, since their life-span can be made to seem fractured and discontinuous, measured as it is by their servicing role within a male economy. And then women’s needs differ so markedly at different ages. I joined the Labour Party in ...”

“... were more congenial (a Japanese official actually said that). This, whatever some apologists may say, is not the same as ignorant American views of foreigners or Mrs Thatcher’s jingoistic talk about Victorian values. (These values can be shared by, say, Leon Brittan, even though his ancestors were hardly of ‘pure’ English stock.) The difference is ...”

“... This presupposition is, of course, built into the electoral laws of democratic states: children may not vote, nor may retarded people, nor may animals. Modern democracies are ruled, in effect, by an educational or intellectual élite – consisting of sane adult human beings who have ...”

“... Football: ‘It was the most democratic game and the most international. By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished.’ On the subject of birth control few would quarrel with his memorable advice: ‘The historian should bear in mind that between about 1880 and 1940 or so, he has on his hands a frustrated ...”

“... Newland’s collection, Eric Helleiner is suitably cautious about the power this confers. Japan may have more leverage over its borrowers than the Saudis had after the first oil-price rise in 1973. But it has much less than the United States was able to exert throughout the Fifties and Sixties. If there is a power in Japan’s new economic ...”

“... that stays NEWS”. READ him: Read HIM.’ The capitalisation is very much of the period, and it may he that the message is as well. For the poet’s death was shortly followed by a critical work, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1974), which placed him at the head of the ‘Men of 1914’, and chronicled in elegiac terms his lifelong struggle to reanimate a ...”

“... go popular, that we go American, with threats that if we do not we shall be labelled, as the case may be, cold, academic or parochial. Since the Forties, various translators have put pressure on us to share, even emulate, the feelings of East Europeans who have had a wider and harsher political experience than ourselves. Yes, these are the squalls that have ...”

“... or quasi-coalition regimes beholden to Moscow.’ If that was indeed the intention – and it may well have been – there would have been little objection to it on the part of Russia’s wartime allies, who in 1945 were in no mood to peer too closely behind a semi-respectable democratic façade. A policy of ‘Finlandisation’ in East and Central Europe ...”

“... for strong-mindedness: his own was the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able ...”

“... there yet.” And so ...’ This was Petrov telling a story as we sat around a bivouac fire in May 1970, somewhere in the flat lands east of Muié (which is south of Luso, which is ‘some place down there’), so as to explain the wrongful reputation given to his people, the Angolans, by their neighbours in Southern Africa. Although his own language is ...”

“... into a belligerent party and made their humanitarian function yet more difficult. Old UN hands may recall the Congo, but at least some Americans must be remembering their experience in the Lebanon in 1983, when, having become equally involved in the local disputes and suffering heavy losses in consequence, they had to stage a humiliating withdrawal. The ...”

“... of America, a refracted image in the American looking-glass.’ Racialist fictions at this level may be readily identifiable. But Gates, not above a certain archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to ...”

“... many questions for its own good. How does it feel to feel that you are – and then again that you may not be – except that you know you must be – you are – it is expected of you – a Messiah? How does it feel to have a Messiah in the family – as your son – when you devoutly wish to have your Messiah somewhere else, preferably in the next world? How ...”

“... For as the OED informs us, the crowd is only a throng or dense multitude, while the mob may mean the lower orders, rabble, tumultuous crowd or a promiscuous assemblage of persons. In fact, the connotations of ‘crowd’ are more mobile and more complex than they may look at first glance. According to ...”

“... And also that the creative artist was in some sense a problem, at least for psychoanalysis. Art may not be soluble in terms of psychoanalysis – it is difficult to see now why anyone should want it to be – but it is interesting to see what kind of object it is for different psychoanalysts, both how they find themselves using it in their writing and what ...”