“... What is a ‘Grand’ as opposed to a ‘General’ theory, in the human sciences or anywhere else? Nobody talks about Keynes’s Grand Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, any more than they do about Einstein’s Grand Theory of Relativity. If not frankly pejorative, the term is at best ironic, implying a loftiness of tone, an inflation of aim, and a pretentiousness of content which no serious academic author could possibly want to be charged with ...”

“... Anthropological method, as classically practised by Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders, depends in the first instance on patient scrutiny of the details of the daily life of the community under study. But it depends also on the detection in, or behind, those details of what Malinowski himself called ‘the natives’ Weltanschauung’ – that is, the whole unspoken complex of myths, prejudices, values and assumptions through which they interpret the meaning of the world to themselves ...”

“... hardest-hitting indictment of restrictive fiscal policies will move those for whom the defeat of wage-fuelled inflation is the overriding priority in the quest for the grail of sustained real economic growth. Like Harrison’s epigraphs, the QueenSpark Rates Book Group’s invocation of General Pinochet as the bogeyman of monetarism will merely help to ...”

“... intended unemployment to stay at three million. Nor is it as if Baldwin didn’t also believe that wage rises at the expense of productivity make unemployment that much harder to bring down, whatever the trade cycle is doing. For all the difference in style between conciliatory, paternalistic, undoctrinaire Baldwin and confrontational, populist, strident ...”

“... Any argument about religion, whether conducted in the seminar room or the saloon bar, is likely to hit the buffers not just because people hold different religious beliefs but because they disagree about what should or should not be counted as an instance of religion in the first place. Nobody will query the inclusion of what goes on at High Mass in Notre Dame or on the prayer-mats of the Islamic faithful or in a Hindu temple or at a Merina death ritual in Madagascar ...”

“... an offer of good negotiable paper underwritten with a cash alternative. In the case of Walter Runciman plc, such a multiple of prospective earnings would (in some kibitzers’ estimates) take the shares up to well over twice what they are trading at today. But the only certainty is that anyone who claims to be able to predict a share price twelve months ...”

“... The point of Dwarfs’ Lib is not to convince the world that differences in height are an optical illusion foisted by sinister interests on a gullible public. Nor is it to promote a literal cutting-down to size of anybody over 4’1”. It is to vindicate the right of very small people to be treated with equal respect by their taller fellows. In precisely the same way, the American myth of equality is not a fairy-tale denial of the palpable fact that some Americans have very much less power and money than others ...”

“... How is it that the members of a species as greedy, quarrelsome, egoistic and deceitful as ours still manage to live together in societies sufficiently harmonious and orderly not to be constantly breaking apart? Mid-20th-century sociologists used to call it ‘the problem of order’, which many of them saw as constituting the raison d’être for the academic discipline of sociology ...”

“... not definable in class terms; the persistent lack of trade-union solidarity; the effects of wage-inflation on real incomes; the vulnerability of the high-cost industrial economies to competition from low-cost, newly-industrialising ones – all these things have made it increasingly difficult for the self-proclaimed heirs of the socialist tradition to ...”

“... it was seriously discomfiting for Attlee’s. After 1945, the union leaders agreed to a measure of wage restraint for a limited time, but by the 1950s Attlee would have had no more success than Harold Wilson was to have in sustaining an incomes policy. It was as unacceptable as compulsory arbitration or, worse still, direction of labour. The unions were not ...”

“... In the bad old days of academic insularity, when Anglo-Saxon philosophers dismissed Continental philosophy as so much hot air, Continental philosophers were equally ready to dismiss analytical philosophy in its Anglo-Saxon form as flippant and trivial. It is a measure of how far things have changed for the better that Professor Habermas of Frankfurt not only commands a substantial following in the English-speaking world but is himself as willing to proffer a citation from Austin or Ryle as from Husserl or Heidegger ...”

“... at home in topics like class conflict, the formation of states and the displacement of slavery by wage-labour. But there is more to cultural evolution than just the relative psychological attraction of different memes. Blackmore sweepingly asserts that ‘social scientists study the way that people’s lives and selves are constructed by their roles, and by ...”

“... Now that Tony Blair has almost stopped hanging around the office poisoning the chalice for his inevitable successor, the season for political obituaries is wide open. Not that it hadn’t already started, with a raft of more and less uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry ...”

“... When I published my last LRB Diary in June, I half-expected that it would be not only reprinted but also spoofed by one or another of the broadsheets, as indeed it was. What I didn’t expect was that the Daily Telegraph would try to use it as party-political knocking copy when any reader could tell that behind its even-handed mistrust of all politicians was a genuine pleasure at the displacement of Major Ltd by Blair & Co ...”

“... 10 June 1993. Fellow-guests with Tony and Cherie Blair at a BBC dinner. Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s 50th birthday?’ She answers: ‘Yes, and you neither came nor replied.’ ‘Didn’t I?’ says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds ...”