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“... 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts in Washington. It contained the killer quote: ‘The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ This confirmed, if confirmation were still needed, that Blair’s lie to the Commons was not a careless ...”

“... if Milton is ignored, so, too, are the classical foundations on which his republicanism stands. As Martin Dzelzainis argues in an essay on his republicanism in the Companion, he drew on Sallust and Roman law for his account of the ennobling effects of liberty. One phrase in Milton’s History of Britain – ‘from obscure and small to grow eminent and ...”

“... was, on the face of it, an obvious target for theories of decline of the sort made familiar by Martin Wiener and Corelli Barnett, but it was only (as Clarke notes) damned in hindsight. At the time, unemployment was endured with a stoicism whose obvious counterpart lay in Victorian England – in the Lancashire cotton famine of the 1860s. It was only c.1960 ...”

“... actors aren’t all that rational, or aren’t that bothered about reaching agreement; names like Martin McGuinness and Garry McMichael come to mind. Perhaps if the conditions requited for these participatory structures to work were met, there would be room for political compromise even here. But then what has to be conjectured away is just what makes for ...”

“... to pouring hundreds of billions of dollars towards Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, General Dynamics, Martin Marietta and so on. Even though there’s no money to pay for it. Even though this means a huge budget deficit, means cutting back on education and social spending, means borrowing abroad, means becoming a debtor nation, means the collapse of the ...”

“... to the US to decide what constitutes allowable and non-allowable changes. A like-minded colleague, Richard Pipes of Harvard, suggested that the new Administration reclassify the world into two simple camps: pro-Communist nations and anti-Communist nations. If the return to the Cold War seems on one level to entail a new assertiveness, it has also encouraged a ...”

“... friend. Murdoch brings her friends, Schopenhauer, Simone Weil, Anselm, Hume, Wittgenstein, Martin Buber, but above all Plato. Perhaps you will warm to her book only if most of her friends are your friends. This has little to do with philosophical doctrine. I happen to be an entrenched nominalist and don’t for a moment believe in Plato’s Ideas or ...”

“... glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman ...”

“... former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was edited by Richard Crossman and the Congress distributed it. Carefully negotiating my way through a maze of booksellers’ wares laid out on the pavement alongside Ezbekieh Gardens in Cairo in late 1957, I was brought up short by a large pile of TGTFs stacked in front of ...”

“... imitations of Eugène Atget, and his attempts when in Africa to be more like the great Hungarian Martin Munkácsi, were unpromising. Then came Surrealism – or an attempt at it. A curtain wrapped around a head, a shirt hanging upside down on a washing line like a ghost, animal entrails arranged into abstractions: photography, for those who take a principled ...”

“... him and his supporters as far-right zealots. Social scientists, among them Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, saw the Goldwaterites as the embodiment of a pathological ‘authoritarian personality’, wholly out of touch with the liberalism they believed was central to the American public. ‘When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so ...”

“... in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The 15th century had seen a great flowering of the visual ...”

“... A blank page is frightening. Something has to be written, but how do you choose the words? Why this word and not that? How to overcome the arbitrariness of writing? One way is to trick yourself, to pretend that what you’re about to write has already been written, that someone has been there already and that you’re only following his traces, trying to reconstruct what must have happened ...”

“... religious reawakening, sold well and was made into a sentimental movie starring Judy Holliday and Richard Conte. Backed by a reasonably lavish promotional campaign (‘In a CHANGING world, this motion picture is joyously dedicated to the heartwarming fact that BABIES still come in the same old, wonderfully old-fashioned way!’), the film was profitable and ...”

“... play’. If you sit up late enough watching DVDs of the BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness, or Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books ...”