“... problems of causation. Is there a collection of social or institutional preconditions which may be shown to account for it? If there is, then serious research needs to be done on Scottish government and society in the early 18th century, for the understanding of both of these remains limited. We ought also to be looking critically at the intellectual ...”

“... itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity – not infallible, for it may do wrong; but irresistible.’ And in 1776 Bentham launched his attack on ‘unmeaning’ statements: there were no ‘assignable bounds to the supreme power’ in a state. ‘To say that there is any act that they [Parliament] cannot do, to speak of any ...”

“... with him or her. And here the special token of love is that ‘it’ that wants to be found. We may remember from twenty years ago in Rabbit, run Harry’s vision of ‘this thing that wasn’t there’: ‘What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?’ Harry, of course, has many sentimental moments in these ...”

“... as it did a uniquely comprehensive monument to past greatness. Rhetoric, sentiment and panegyric may all have been eschewed (‘No flowers, by request,’ as Alfred Ainger put it), but it remained the DNB’s purpose ‘to do the state some service’ by ‘helping the present and future generations to realise more thoroughly than were otherwise possible the ...”

“... look at all experience through the highly selective prism of its effect on the Jewish predicament may sometimes be useful in certain political and social spheres, but in historical scholarship it can only lead to grotesque absurdities. Exclusive emphasis on the role of the Jews in, say, the Reformation puts one in mind of those photographs of great events ...”

“... art history is under strong attack from those who deplore its lack of intellectual content, there may well be something to be gained from looking at the influence exerted by a man whose genuine passion for ideas only rarely met with that critical yet sensitive response which is always necessary if the subject of art history is indeed once again to become ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all you find they marry, and make very unsatisfactory and physically inefficient mothers ... You may think you have done no harm to her health by your training; and that may be true enough while she remains single; but have you done it positive good? Have you let it lay up that reserve fund of strength without which ...”

“... to a tribunal headed by the author and judge Lord John Campbell. His decision was delivered on 19 May 1852 and published in its entirety by the triumphant Times. Campbell came down uncompromisingly for free trade. The Regulations, they said, were indefensible, and contrary to the freedom which ought to prevail in commercial transactions. Although the seller ...”

“... although his poems deal with childhood traumas, they are not confessional; ‘the material, we may say, remains psychologically unanalysed while being thoroughly poetically analysed (by image, by placement, by narrative).’ By ‘analysed’, Vendler hardly means analysed into existence, in the Freudian sense; she means analysed into invisibility ...”

“... treatment becomes more rapid, and there are one or two odd repetitions and discontinuities that may be signs of haste. Mysteriously, ‘Welsh hymnody lies outside the scope of this book,’ though American hymnody is examined – and rightly so, if only because so many Victorian hymns which have become popular in Britain are of American ...”