“... Here is John Locke on the subject of second-hand knowledge in philosophy and the sciences: we may as rationally hope to see with other men’s eyes as to know by other men’s understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true knowledge. The floating of other men’s opinions in our ...”

“... The first thing that must strike anyone opening this well-produced book – and they may do so with apprehension, since company histories are notoriously bland – is the wonderful harvest of illustrations, ranging from No 1, a photograph of the founder and his son, the strangely whiskered Julius Reuter and Herbert, circa 1870, to No 63, a Reuters news picture of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ...”

“... British popular politics. The present series is a selection and not the complete output, and we may be thankful for that. It could have been pruned down more. I find Volume I – Political Writings I – superfluous, apart from the editor’s general introduction to the series; as are Volumes VI, Essays, and VII, Religious Writings. These will be useful to ...”

“... British people that it has been made out to be. This optimistic analysis is hard to endorse. It may well be, as Hirst reports, that popular support for the principles of the National Health Service is still ‘overwhelming’. It may well still be the case, as it was in 1987, that fewer than 5 per cent of the population ...”

“... drawn verbatim from this book, was among the papers seized at Thomas Kyd’s lodgings on 11 May 1593. These ‘vile hereticall conceipts’, as the investigators called them, were found to be Marlowe’s. They had got ‘shuffled’ with Kyd’s papers when the two writers were sharing a chamber in 1591. A week later Marlowe was himself summoned before ...”

“... writing, the long and intricate continuities from draft to draft that we find, say, in Proust. We may guess that the seepage must take place somehow, if that’s our biographical theory, but we certainly don’t see it. We do see something other than Stendhal’s mistakes, however. We see him cruising, so to speak: not in the workshop but on the prowl. We see ...”

“... right-wing electoral politics, through the generation of co-operative economic development, and may prove to be a far more powerful agent for North American interests than the CIA can ever be. As developmental economists realised in the Sixties, and as the American banks were to learn in the Eighties, underdevelopment, once the underpinning of the European ...”

“... to remain, on first-name terms with the media phenomenon whose personal and material success may often have been envied or deplored in his lifetime, but is now applauded everywhere – very properly when measured against the talent and hard work invested in it, less so when it is seen as another rallying-point for the enemies of Modernism. If in the ...”

“... well until Avril, Orwell’s sister, turned up and decided she wanted to stay. Susan Watson ‘may have felt overly sensitive to any criticism from Avril, and in her own mind the comments about her disability may have taken on more importance than Avril had intended. But she could not have been mistaken about the feeling ...”

“... formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as these things are practised in the world, but Derrida has made it clear (especially in the 1989 ‘Afterword’ to Limited inc. but also in ...”

“... at the micro level it is disdained as a fanciful speculation and treated as mere chance. This may be too stringent an approach, however. Historians do seek to resolve issues about the respective roles of individuals and milieus, and no matter how naive, they try to think through complex situations altered by the absence of key leaders. If Lincoln or Franz ...”

“... though it is fair to add that he has among the most testing leadership jobs in the world, and may be doomed to fail whatever he does, because the tensions and problems are simply too great for anyone. This is in part the theme of John Morrison’s efficient and often thoughtful biography, which sets out to show that, contrary to the view held (at least ...”

“... of the communal violence in Yugoslavia, the United Kingdom’s internal war in Northern Ireland may at times appear trivial. At plenty of other times, however, it can appear that factional hatreds have locked the Province into a cycle of violence equal in ferocity to anything experienced in Sarajevo. Over the past two decades terrorists have murdered more ...”

“... the Intolerable’ and ‘The New Calculus of Olfactory Pleasure’, so one may expect few concessions to the hilarity that sometimes marks lay responses to disorderly ordure. Freud was unusual in devoting some attention to the relatively feeble olfactory powers of human beings, and philosophers, as Corbin remarks, have tended to ignore ...”

“... To be good at music as a child is not always an unmixed blessing. It brings complications that may take a lifetime to smooth out. For some, a musical gift may prove to be a poison (Gift in the German sense). A child who is spoken to by music will quickly learn to speak through music. This is what adults call talent, and ...”