“... he was concerned less with inferring qualities of sensibility than with unmasking ideologies. It may be, however, that his work on language will prove to have been his most distinctive achievement. It emerges from his perception that certain items of our conceptual vocabulary – the ‘keywords’ – offer an unrivalled register of the historical changes ...”

“... Realise that the other party is not obligated to be anything like he/she says, and in fact may be playing a joke on you.’ (Go to Furry MUCK at furry.com if you are a tinybit curious.) It’s not all fun and games. Some promising educational initiatives use MOOs (go to telnet ‘moolano.berkeley.edu 8888’ for a demonstration). Educational MOOs ...”

“... was two years from the signing of the Agreement, a period subsequently defined as ending in May 2000 – but no date was specified for starting the process. By contrast, the Executive was to be set up quite quickly. The Unionists were bound to be displeased with this interpretation of the timing of events. Some were not prepared to accept the absence of ...”

“... help the million or so Kosovars in whose name Serbia is being bombed. Its principal achievements may be to ensure the death of the ‘new world order’ famously heralded by George Bush after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, and to destroy an institution that has helped to prevent international wars for over half a century. In 1945, the United States and ...”

“... such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence of utopian imagination in a book that loudly decries the failure to think boldly about a different future, there is no dearth of attempts to do so in the recent ...”

“... both, but it’s not a politically motivated novel. The madness of the Cultural Revolution years may form a distinctive backcloth, but very firmly in the foreground is that familiar figure, the love triangle. As the title suggests, not very much happens in Waiting. Lin Kong, a medical officer in the People’s Liberation Army, is forced by his dying mother ...”

“... green hat’. A dreadful tale starts emerging in fits and glimpses as to why this family’s story may have gone so wrong. It’s stuff like stuff we’ve all heard about before, a dysfunctional family system, complicated and subtle, an accumulation of little things sliding out of true. But I’m not going to list these things, because the minute you do so, it ...”

“... the trench is more likely to have been covered over by other soldiers out of respect; the bayonets may have been planted to mark a mass grave. But the significance of the site was assured, given Pétain’s status as the ‘Victor of Verdun’ and France’s saviour, according to the young Captain Charles de Gaulle – wounded and taken prisoner under ...”

“... one extreme to another, or trying to combine them in some paradoxical unity. For all I know, this may be one aspect of the ‘mysterious’ Russian soul. Since the Soviet Union closed its frontiers and put up its Iron Curtain, the behaviour of its citizens has become less and less predictable to Westerners. When the Western mind concludes that it’s ...”

“... that they had not been ripped open like pigs.’ The reappearance of the porky metaphor may indicate a family habit of speech, since Edwin Tennyson d’Eyncourt wrote of his cousin: ‘What a hog that Alfred is, and what can you expect from a pig but a grunt.’ Tennyson was 12 when he wrote the first letter in this volume, which closes with his ...”

“... resides more in the successful treatment of sows’ ears than in an appeal to silk purses may seem obvious enough. In China, it preceded Mao, and will survive him. But in the Soviet Union it has yet to reach the department in the Kremlin where publishing decisions are taken. Lesley Chamberlain, whose Food and Cooking of Russia suggests that she spent ...”

“... its composer’s world view. The two hands, however, are so different from each other that one may doubt whether theirs is the same trunk: great music expresses religious facts – or, if you like, metaphysical truths – which words really can’t; whereas words express political facts which music, let’s face it, can’t. Eisler, his biographer, and ...”

“... Inverness (in that order)’. But dedicated fieldwork by itself is not enough. Ungenerous as it may seem to carp at the fruits of so much painstaking scholarship, it has to be said that the Handbook rests on solider empirical than theoretical ground. The back cover suggests that it can be read as a guide to ‘upper-class’ life. But this is misleading. As ...”

“... after these interviews, circling around even the last of his decisions. With his death at 92 on a May afternoon in 1979 in the wards of the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital – and with the passing of the Master’s daughter in London this autumn – one perhaps has the right to feel, for the first time, that a current which was once part of the air we breathe ...”

“... glamour status which has been bestowed upon its upstart urban neighbour. In popular terms, this may be because of the very different relationship which these two subjects have with contemporary perceptions of the urban and the rural environment. For the many who spurn and despise the city, and regard urbanisation as a cultural and environmental ...”