“... everything the wrong way round.’ And that had to be their advantage. Indeed, the Columbians’ self-deprecating excuse became the basis of what he agrees to have been his most celebrated thought: that rather than start with everything at once, or start at the theoretically-appointed place, with iron and steel and machine tools, and work forwards, one might ...”

“... of what matters to those who believe foreign affairs matter to their lives, Georgia seems minor: self-contained, complex, resistant to solutions. The argument for it mattering is not the so far relatively small loss of life, but the fact that it is an extreme but not wayward example of the particularist and defensive ethno-nationalism which is now becoming ...”

“... within the framework of classical economics, in which it was assumed that market forces were self-regulating, and reached a point of equilibrium at full employment. His one major theoretical work, A Treatise on Money (1930), was an attempt to find a loophole, within the classical system, that would justify a job-creation programme of public ...”

“... is that many, though not all, parts of Eastern Europe have had little experience of pluralistic self-government. But the most important is the deeply corrupting effect that Communist rule has had on the individuals and societies it governed. Where the distribution of all benefits depended on favouritism, patronage, conformity and careerism, it became more ...”

“... turned back from their descent and fled upward, had taken under a quarter of an hour. The self-accelerating fire had run fifteen hundred yards up the gulch in less than half an hour, the last eleven hundred yards in less than fifteen minutes. In the first half of the book, Maclean recounts the basic story, with digressions on the nature of ...”

“... recorded in earlier volumes. The distinctions include cowardice, sottishness, corpulence, self-identification with the deity and a failure to rise from the dead after an undertaking to do so. The individuals thus branded will still apparently figure in the new edition, along with old favourites like ...”

“... South-East Europe along supposedly ethnic lines, based on the Woodrow Wilson principle of national self-determination. That these same treaties codified the rights of minorities was only logical, since it was the creation of these nation-states on the basis of dominant ethnic groups that had the instant fleet of establishing such ‘minorities’. Many of ...”

“... Death centres on the confrontation between Danton and Robespierre. Danton’s opposition to the self-perpetuating violence of the Terror links him with earlier opponents of absolutism, while Robespierre’s insistence that terror is needed in order to establish the reign of virtue seems to anticipate the claims of later tyrants to be mere instruments of ...”

“... novel of sensibility was the wasting of a morbid ‘finer spirit’ who could discover no second self in the world. (The genre always leaned toward epistle and monologue because the reader was required to become that self.) Yet the style of feeling which had supported the ambitions and consoled the anxiety of three ...”

“... a concept of property which was ‘social’ rather than state or private, and a Gramscian view of self-managing civil society – as well as a commitment to ‘bourgeois’ liberties like political pluralism and parliamentary democracy. This was the elusive ‘Third Way’ – the alternative script which had been accumulating Communist rejection slips since ...”

“... they were built to sustain have cracked and crumbled. The most influential modern biography of the self-styled ‘Louis the Great’, Pierre Goubert’s Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, presents the King as a man whose thirst for glory led the vast majority of his subjects into a condition of ‘primitive, anarchic wretchedness’. Modern historians ...”

“... to memorise a collection of words that included four terms of praise – ‘adventurous’, ‘self-confident’, ‘independent’ and ‘persistent’. A second group was asked to memorise a similar list except that the four positive words were replaced by ‘reckless’, ‘conceited’, ‘aloof’ and ‘stubborn’. Both groups then moved on to an ...”

“... O.K. ... Just as Grace Paley the pacifist and political activist is never polemical, preachy or self-righteous in her fiction, so Grace Paley the feminist is unpredictable: an artist, and not a propagandist. Of course, the predominant concerns of the Collected Stories are with women’s issues. Virtually all the stories are narrated from a woman’s ...”

“... can call up, more or less at will, a would-be disarming cuteness of address, a somewhat chilled, self-loving geniality. Salinger reserves his cuteness for his fiction, Updike for his non-fiction. Indeed, Updike’s literary-professional demeanour, hugely prolific, well-mannered, prize-conscious, ever ready to grant interviews, write prefaces and ...”

“... Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections – Hanif Kureishi, for example – don ‘t of course tell us ...”