“... handed to Ceylon’s elite on a platter. ‘Think of Ceylon as a little bit of England,’ Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were ...”

“... to chair the SNC but was kept on a short leash, being re-elected only for three-month terms. By May 2012 he had abandoned his opposition to the militarisation of the anti-Assad movement, but then abruptly decided that his position had become untenable and resigned. On 11 November 2012 a new body to speak for the Syrian opposition abroad was established, the ...”

“... the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de ...”

“... is classified ‘B’, meaning ‘no reason not to murder immediately’. Two weeks later, on 15 May 1944, he was one of 878 able-bodied men on Convoy 73, the only one of 79 convoys with no women or children, and the only one not headed for Auschwitz. It went to Kaunas in Lithuania. It is thought that the men were assigned to dig up and burn the bodies of ...”

“... which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which is all ...”

“... intruder had unscrewed the handle of the cottage door and let himself in. Doris and her boyfriend Ernest had been asleep in the double bed and Jo had been stretched out on a mat in the passage. First thing she’d known the man was pulling off her pants and trying to lie on top of her. She screamed, Doris woke up and pressed the remote-control button which ...”

“... us than that of diversitvy, which epitomises for us a long past of misfortune and abjection?’ It may be less the fact than the cult of regional diversity that tells us something Specific about the history of France.There is a second claim for French specificity in Braudel’s account, less prominent or pursued, but comparable in kind. Turning from geography ...”

“... the Cross!’; or that the photographer Nadar was shortsighted to the point of blindness; or that Ernest Renan recoiled from the English word ‘comfort’ in 1859 with ‘I am forced to use this barbarous word to express an idea quite un-French’; or that after Thermidor, busts of Marat and Le Peletier were transferred, presumably from the high altar of the ...”

“... side. My father advised caution: ‘Best not to have too many illusions; the anti-imperialists may not have been as solid as you think.’ Both my mother and my father broke politically with the family, and became communists. My father was very active in the party, which delayed their wedding a bit. My grandfather refused to allow her to marry a communist ...”

“... that is, no gradation in nature’. Commended to the English reader by the impeccably liberal Ernest Barker (who performed the same service for Oakeshott’s survey of contemporary political doctrines soon afterwards, forming an incongruous trait d’ union between the two men), Strauss’s book was on the whole well received by Oakeshott, as the most ...”

“... an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s correspondence with this little cabal breathes with that abject eagerness that was so much a part of the one-time Anglo-American ‘special ...”

“... is what moves his naturalism beyond pessimistic determinism. The actions and circumstances of man may be understood as a product of his biology and social environment, but through careful study of these forces we can choose to act in ways that counter them. Therefore, Zola’s naturalism not only holds that one can shape and change one’s fate, but that it ...”

“... quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a thousand little signs tell me so … Later, I watched him in the pub and noticed his beautiful wife, but I did not want to go too close to him. He was dead within three years. More than twenty years later in Paris, the French ...”

“... states in Africa and Asia and no doubt Latin America as well (Cuba and Venezuela spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine ...”

“... the world of ‘my mother’s taste’. My whole life up to now – as even the slow-witted reader may have deduced – has from one angle been a fairly heartless repudiation of maternal sentimentality: all the bright, powerless, feminine things. Now especially, her world is largely one of kitty cats, splashy floral bedspreads and pillow shams, Mrs See’s ...”