“... No policy-maker or analyst can, of course, avoid starting from certain assumptions. The best course, Mr Laqueur implies, is to try to follow a middle way between the ‘Pollyanna’ (wishful thinking) and ‘Cassandra’ (expecting the worst) syndromes. ‘Pollyanna’ holds the key to some of the classic examples of intelligence surprise. In 1941 ...”

“... in Norris’s treatment of authors like Frege, Quine and Davidson. They will certainly remain (at best) unmoved by his confident view that ‘Derrida shows – in exemplary close-reading style – how Aristotle’s entire metaphysics rests on a notion of momentary consciousness which his text simultaneously works to undo.’ But this statement need not be ...”

“... that the working class ‘ought’ to fulfil a given historical role is not celebratory but, at best, apologetic. This version focuses on the failure of the working class to act as the executors of Marx’s prophecy by blowing the foundations sky high. Here the concept of the labour aristocracy has often been invoked to explain the differentiation of a ...”

“... him up to a respectable £593,000 a year. The chairman of Bass’s remuneration committee was Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy, chairman of Kingfisher, whose own remuneration committee decided he was worth an equivalent rise, bringing him to £ 1.3m a year. Kingfisher’s committee was chaired by Sir Nigel Mobbs of Slough Estates, whose own remuneration committee decided ...”

“... serious, deliberate and urgent, a new way of stressing the high importance of the subject. At his best, Leavis seemed to move with the most exciting movements of language, and he was determined to teach others who wished to be civilised how, at its best, language, the main medium of culture, worked in great writing. He ...”

“... of Britain would think if it were claimed that their ‘feelings, desires and aspirations’ were best represented by ‘dukes, earls and barons’. Later Harold Wilson used exactly the same analogy to Smith. Most Colonial Office personnel seem to have taken Banda’s and Wilson’s side. In March 1965 the British high commissioner in Southern Rhodesia ...”

“... a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less ...”

“... straight up the rocks: a proper jetty was built only in 1912. Walkers could access one of the best beaches, at Port es Saies, by means of a rope hanging over the cliff.Victorians and Edwardians who took this sort of thing in their stride made Sark a tourist destination. Once steamers opened the Channel Islands to British travellers in the 1830s, Sark’s ...”

“... but, as with everything else about Katerina, we cannot be sure. ‘I write poems and make the best of what I have’ is as much as she will tell us. The haunting thing about the book is what’s missing from it, what it refrains from giving away, and absence is also an effect of the language, which isn’t bad but too colourlessly correct, continually ...”

“... important males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little ...”

“... accounts of their experience. I can think only of Nigel Lawson and, rather less thoroughly, Geoffrey Howe, who have done us the favour of attempting serious revelation of their public work – though the first Thatcher volume, highly selective as it is, is in a special class, and Douglas Hurd, who did produce a little gem about the Heath years, may yet ...”

“... the headhunters, Price Waterhouse, what is one to make of the report that they were auditors to Geoffrey Robinson’s company, Transtec, whose accounts are currently being investigated? Patronage at one or two removes still remains patronage. Of the four independents, three are assigned to the Celtic fringe; Welsh and Scottish independents will no doubt ...”

“... as a verbalist, someone who could perceive no reality beyond words, who liked the bigger ones the best, and who wanted his readers to cry out with ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’ as they reached for their dictionaries. Geoffrey Grigson, in a review that Burgess seems to have learned by heart, said that his journalism was driven by ...”

“... days the shops still accepted ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of the prewar Dales of her childhood. The only time I remember thinking that something really foreign was happening on one ...”

“... Over the course​ of a week in March, Lee Sedol, the world’s best player of Go, played a series of five games against a computer program. The series, which the program AlphaGo won 4-1, took place in Seoul, while tens of millions watched live on internet feeds. Go, usually considered the most intellectually demanding of board games, originated in China but developed into its current form in Japan, enjoying a long golden age from the 17th to the 19th century ...”