“... by his book. William Gass was right to agree that many of the values defended by Rybczynski are ‘vital and worthy’, and to accept – albeit ‘at a certain split-level of ontology’ – that there is ‘nothing better than the life of the bourgeois’. He was also right to persist with critical questions beyond this point. Rybczynski may describe ...”

“... wrought by Nayim’s unimaginable spontaneity, lobbing the ball from the half-way line clean over David Seaman’s head into the net to win the match for Zaragosa. In none of these cases is the beauty of the events lost when we revisit them. Indeed, one could well argue that it is only by revisiting the site of a moment of artistic inspiration that its beauty ...”

“... He tries to make things flippantly plain. ‘You see, kid,’ he begins, ‘the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.’ Part of his story depends on his relationship with his brother, Lev, an ugly runt who – he found, on Lev’s arrival at the camp in 1948 – had unaccountably married the only girl he ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... central theme. A ‘strong’ authority is required to ‘enforce compliance’; ‘discipline is vital to the Eurozone.’ Asked by a Libération journalist whether the European Stability Mechanism was not ‘a technocratic dictatorship’, Verhofstadt preferred to call it a ‘transitional stage’ – after all, nation-states had existed for centuries ...”

“... Such teleological tales of the ascent of the state, and/or of civilisation itself, remain a vital element in the more panoramic political theorising. ‘Pseudo-kinship’ had an important role to play in the earliest stages of this narrative, a simple-minded way for simple-minded people to conceive of ties to other members of their tribe to whom they ...”

“... sentiment in Liverpool. But there were more Leylands than Roscoes, and not just because, as David Eltis reminds us in his deeply researched new book, slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was ...”

“... on the mainland, and also unwilling to compete with other writers. His English biographer David Gilmour suspects that he was moved to write by his sense that as an ‘ultimate descendant of an ancient noble line whose economic and physical extinction culminated in himself’, he would be the last member of his family to have ‘...”

“... without explaining how. He nevertheless assigns the distinction between sense and reference a vital role as a basis for Frege’s introduction of value-ranges as logical objects. His argument here is extremely hard to follow. At first, it appears that the reason is that Axiom V, which governs value-ranges, takes the form of a generalised ...”

“... made possible because of the existence of a great mass of smaller and lesser schools, but this vital suggestion is not subsequently taken up. There are some passing remarks on the grammar and other schools of Medieval England, but virtually nothing on the public schools of the Georgian period, which had a major, I am tempted to say ‘decisive’, impact ...”

“... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...”

“... to perform the alchemy, and to get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman, in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up ...”

“... Her life is likely to rival that of Sylvia Plath as a subject for infinite fascination. It is vital to remember the power these poems had before the details of the poet’s life became public. Some letters are missing. Most of Bishop’s letters to Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares were destroyed, as were her letters to Marjorie Carr Stevens, with whom she ...”

“... had already retired from the ministry when he began the vast task of translating Kierkegaard, and David Swenson died in the middle of translating the great Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was, however, completed by Lowrie, and first appeared in 1941. But in 1941, there were other, more pressing things to think about, and it was not until Sartre and ...”