“... in the South Atlantic was no solution at all? That we are back to square one, that Argentina may carry out bee-sting attacks on our unhappy forces, stationed in the Falklands, if there are no negotiations? That negotiations which do not cover sovereignty will never be entered into by any Argentine government, left, right or centre? That at various stages ...”

“... let’s all focus on making this system work as effectively as possible. If this is your view, you may not wish to read on – or you should at least be warned that this article contains material of an economically explicit nature and some strong language (not all of it mine). But everyone else, including those who are being cowed by their local variant of the ...”

“... are more than performances of disjunction. The process of conjoining different objects or concepts may generate a degree of lexical and conceptual turbulence, but the turbulence isn’t the whole point. Hamlet’s ‘when we have shuffled off this mortal coil’ doesn’t work as a substitute for ‘when we’re dead’ because of any wide disjunction between ...”

“... of a technical concept called ‘expected value’. This principle of maximising expectation may need qualification to allow, for example, for people who are averse to taking risks: it may seem better to keep what you have, rather than risk losing some of it even though in the long term you should end up better off. It ...”

“... been expressed by academics, journalists, officials and others. Diverse as their local situations may have been, not least in the financial or political pressures they experienced, they had been united in their admiration for the quality and standing of British universities in the 20th century. They weren’t just thinking about Oxford and Cambridge. These ...”

“... kinds of interest. Murder fictions let us test our hypotheses about how and why people act. They may also suggest that the things we do when we read most narratives – forming inferences, seeking intelligibility, constructing hypotheses that fit the plot – might be serious kinds of human activity: they might finally uncover why someone made someone else ...”

“... by Mr Bounderby. In this interesting and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France. His subject is the history of the greatest of the 19th-century Paris department stores, the Bon Marché, from its creation until the 1914 War. In his conclusion, however, he suggests that the Bon Marché was not an ...”

“... concert could prevent the spread of these to other major industrial nations. Hindsight may suggest that it was folly for Britain and France to have been tempted down the road, but that wisdom was just as far from those in the seats of power then as it seems to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the ...”

“... and horrible. Few people, after all, think about philosophers much, and some of those who do may well regard them with a mildly bemused respect. But the subject does collect a familiar style of complaint: that philosophy gets no answers, or no answers to any question that any grown-up person would worry about, or no answer which would be worth worrying ...”

“... I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was willing to admit I belonged. This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration: his mistakes are the ...”

“... present. The apocalyptic aspects of science, with the next breakthrough just around the corner, may add to the distortion by a more general undervaluation of the past. And the distortion is often sealed by an appeal to history for corroboration of fashionable stereotypes of scientific method, the classic discoveries having been made by ‘prepared ...”

“... for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long time, about a century and a half ...”

“... on the principle that you can’t beat something with nothing. Whatever objections one may have to neo-classical economics, it certainly is something: a highly-developed and formalised body of thought which has been applied to a wide range of practical and theoretical issues. One would hesitate before saying that the work of Marx, Schumpeter or ...”

“... Vladimir Putin may or may not be dismantling Yeltsinism. But he is not dismantling ‘democracy’, for no such system existed in Russia before his accession to power. After a decade of multiparty elections, neither the rich nor the powerful seem to take the slightest interest in the well-being of the electorate, even though a dim regard for public support may have inspired authorities to escalate the conflict in Chechnya and throttle critics in the press ...”

“... it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.It may be a parody, but this little narrative encapsulates one of the structuring claims of contemporary public debate. We can argue over the extent to which merit is, in fact, now the chief determinant of reward, but there is remarkably wide agreement that it ...”