“... given to looking forward to the time when the economy would be managed by monetary and fiscal means alone. It was recognised that there would have to be a period of transition between the end of hostilities and the emergence of a normal market economy, during which the elaborate wartime machinery of rationing and quantitative controls would have to be ...”

“... their admirers, especially those who become tourists of a foreign revolution while retaining the means to return home to safety. Some years ago, an admiring reviewer suggested that Cobb’s only weakness was his inability ‘to bring himself to sympathise with those who seek to exercise power, be their motives good or evil’. In the introduction to his next ...”

“... Efficiency is intended to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget. But it also putatively means placing the power to hire and fire in the hands of the world’s richest man. You do not need to have a massively bloated government in order to operate a spoils system, as 19th-century politicians understood. All you need is an unaccountable government. In ...”

“... liberation conceals a genuine concern. Gray is driven by the need to be free of himself; that he means it is made clear only in those rare instances when he succeeds. At a Zendo in the Catskills: About the fifth day there, something happened that I’d only read of or experienced on LSD. I was sitting there meditating, and everything all of a sudden just ...”

“... in which to breathe. The high drama engendered in both pictures by the action of the form alone means that these are large-scale gatherings of nude figures which don’t require the sort of dramatic interest normally provided in such works by, say, ill-feeling between Diana and Actaeon or Diana and Callisto. In the absence of that sort of drama some ...”

“... Third Reich and later offenders of a quite different kind. Dehler’s successor called the law a means of ‘making a break with crimes directly or indirectly connected with circumstances prevailing in a chaotic period’, some of the most weaselly words in a book that quotes many. The obfuscation at work in both laws makes it hard to determine how many Nazi ...”

“... sentiment. The Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser – a guarded advocate – says, and means, that the most powerful argument for further development of GM agriculture is ‘the quality of life’ it promises for millions. Nor should the serious issue be perceived as one that pits a Ruskinesque ‘nostalgia for Homeric cheeses’ against a ...”

“... ideas of an author who, though no philosopher, was at least a consistent moralist. This is by no means a hasty or ill-considered Life, however. For the most part, Scott moves around the monument circumspectly, picking her way through the hints and half-sightings, as wary of friendly reports as of the sneerers, and assembles the ‘consistent fiction’ she ...”

“... it appeared instantly and has never lost its hold. To call something a ‘genocide’ similarly means to define it as an act of maximum destructiveness and culpability. Hence the sardonic appeal of a locution like ‘ethnic cleansing’, with its suggestion that nothing more than a routine housekeeping task is involved. Robert Bevan begins his book with an ...”

“... to ‘How does the standard image of wartime London match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by professional historians, in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up ...”

“... shutters put up at the Colosseum’. If a rider’s scoreboard light is on at Signpost Corner, it means he’s only a mile short of the finish line. The expression is also used of someone nearing the end of their life. His subtitle is ‘Memoirs of the Movies, among other Matters’, which has a certain Old English alliterative charm. The memoirs of the ...”

“... A young Englishman of means passing through Rome on the Grand Tour in the mid to late 1700s might well have been directed to the studio of Pompeo Batoni to have his portrait painted. It would probably only have taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual ...”

“... encounter Medieval Latin poetry, if at all, only on record sleeves. For them Carmina Burana means the awful Orff. In his Preface Peter Godman speaks of his ‘solitary task’ writing a book on Carolingian poetry ‘in this damp island off the coast of Europe’; and the preponderance of German names in his notes and bibliography bears out the ...”

“... half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third World can go suck its fist.The ...”

“... think that they could get a good picture of my life from these pages; but it is not so.’ David Newsome, invited and challenged, has entered the labyrinth, drawing the rest of us with him into an implacable game initiated by the diarist. The mirrors and images multiply, with Newsome, the reviewer and the reader locked together in observation, and the ...”