“... years ago in Russia and nearly two hundred years ago in France. It is a point made forcefully by Andrzej Wajda’s latest film, which depicts the struggle between Danton and Robespierre – between humanist and puritan, pragmatist and idealist. Wajda intended it as an allegory on the present-day state of Poland. But his message is painted on a broader ...”

“... account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia. His title, The Missing Will, refers not only to his aboulia but also to an agreeable fantasy of his mother’s: she was an almost illiterate but very pretty Yorkshirewoman, called Bertha Wharton, who had ...”

“... with a few of his own remarks. He challenges you to prove relevance and competence. He wanted to be ‘illustrious and unknown’, and wrong-foots biographers by making their curiosity seem prurient or irrelevant. He thought most writing about art ignorant and unnecessary: ‘I have spoken to the most intelligent people ...”

“... It is often late, by chance, and with sudden delight, that we find those poets who later become vital to us. I knew Sorley MacLean by reputation before I felt his authority. His renovation of a poetic tradition, his cross-fertilisation of love and politics, of metaphysical technique and traditional Gaelic modes, of dan direach and personal destiny – I knew about all this at second-hand; it was part of that store of useful literary information that accumulates at the back of the literary mind like respected, unread books on the bookshelf ...”

“... the epistolary evidence compels a different response. They really were a special breed. ‘It will be Hell to be in it and Hell to be out of it,’ said Rupert Brooke, who sailed cheerfully off with three Coterie chums to the Dardanelles, parading their Classical learning as they passed ...”

“... marshalled. His many insights are highly informative. His few in comprehensions could hardly be more revealing. Mr Carswell names the Assessors who sat with the Robbins Committee and acted as liaison officers with the ministries concerned. He was in the secrets as the Treasury’s Assessor. This book is built round the Robbins Report of 1963 and what ...”

“... life. Most were young and working-class. Many were of Irish origin. Not a single one of them could by any stretch of the imagination be held responsible for or even sympathetic to British government policy in Northern Ireland. The universal horror at this, the biggest killing of civilians in British post-war history, was to ...”

“... 1949 Michael Perrin, one of the heads of the British Atomic Energy Programme, was woken up by an urgent telephone call asking him to come to the communications room at the US Embassy in London. There his opposite number in the Pentagon asked that an RAF plane be sent to the upper atmosphere to check radioactivity ...”

“... notices in occupied Germany warned ‘No Fraternisation’ and each soldier had a booklet, signed by the field-marshal, reminding him why the Master Race was beyond the pale, incapable as it was of ‘any form of decency, or of honourable dealings’. Yet by June 1945 we were printing Monty’s first relaxation of the ...”

“... can’t and therefore hate.) A major contributor to this sense of unchartedness was the decision by the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s to downgrade US government debt from AAA to AA+ status. This might seem like a small technical point, and it’s worth noting that the downgrade had no effect on the price of the debt, meaning that the markets felt it ...”

“... and Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005) – have been taken up by scholars across the social sciences and humanities, many of them in fields far from the orbit of science studies. In some quarters Latour’s ideas have proved unsettling, not to say infuriating. His statements, often in garbled versions, were targets of ...”

“... still an increase of 5 per cent. The budget will grow, but the military will shrink. There will be no more ‘nation-building’, with its long and expensive occupations. Overall troop levels will be cut by about a hundred thousand soldiers and marines. Fewer new planes will ...”

“... are not the end of the book. We turn the page and read a quotation from the American novelist David Markson: ‘Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognisable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred? Nothing more or less than a read?’ We can take the question as referring both to the described movie and to the describing ...”

“... for Interpretation at the European Commission, and he writes fiction full of ideas prompted by his day job. New Finnish Grammar, translated last year, is heavy with fear at what it might be like to lose language altogether. The hero is discovered in Trieste in 1943, with no words, memory or identity. He is thought ...”

“... than Dorothy (and for whom I almost invariably feel slightly sorry) assume that one wishes to be informed about the room or its furniture and pictures, which I don’t always. Sometimes I just want to look and occasionally (18th-century porcelain, Chinoiserie and most tapestries) prefer to walk straight through. Sometimes I actively dislike what I’m ...”