“... with sending a series of obscene letters, mostly addressed to her neighbours Violet and George May. Here is an extract from a letter dated 14 September 1921: ‘You bloody fucking flaming piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. Its your drain that stinks not our fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. You are as bad as your whore neybor.’ The Mays were sent ...”

“... universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth.’ These transports may seem peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, but there is no shortage of more prosaic equivalents on the Continent. For Germany’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, Europe has found ‘exemplary solutions’ for two great issues of the age: ‘governance beyond the ...”

“... complaint is one of the few physical facts recorded about him. There are no clear photographs. He may no longer even be alive. Nevertheless, according to the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, Guzman is ‘the object of religious devotion’ to his Senderista followers and of holy terror to Peru’s middle classes. Nicholas Shakespeare’s fascination with ...”

“... establish the rudiments of a new order was Boris Yeltsin, acting in concert with Gorbachev. They may yet decide to implement the measures of reform they have promised – Mr Yeltsin’s speech of 28 October was the most serious of these promises but, as this is written, it remains only words. After the coup it seemed that Russian power would rush in to fill ...”

“... the force to dislodge him. The Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose plenum met early in May amid widespread speculation in the Soviet and foreign press that it would vote him out of office, managed 13 votes against him out of a total of more than five hundred. More important, Boris Yeltsin, who has just won in the first round the first ever popular ...”

“... suggested) that they are utterly opposed to the Enlightenment and all its scientistic fruits. Marx may not be charged fairly with the sin of individualism (he is as vehement in his condemnation of liberal atomism as any of the communitarians), but he is as guilty, if not more guilty, of materialism, atheism, rationalism, optimism and the general subversion of ...”

“... her Proust book, demonstrating an obvious point in a particularly lumpy way, she remarks: ‘You may be right in seeing my determination ... as the fantasy of a mischievous or well-informed reader.’ Well, no, that wasn’t quite how we saw it. But then the French text, seeming to say much the same thing, strikes a different note: ‘On a le droit de ...”

“... years has been the miserable lot of successive Princes of Wales. To Edward VII and Prince Charles may be added the names of every long-suffering heir since the Hanoverians took over: George II, George IV and Edward VIII, not forgetting poor Prince Frederick, the son of George II and father of George III, who did not survive to reign at all. Whatever their ...”

“... planning’ on the part of Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, from whose book it comes. Though it may not, at first sight, appear any less plausible than a capitalist China ruled by the Chinese Communist Party would have seemed in the Sixties or Seventies, or a Japan producing high-quality, high-cost consumer goods for the world would have done in the ...”

“... of the recurrent reflexiveness in the Brothers’ craft, letting us know that they know that we may fall to imagining that they do not know what they are doing. A repeated example, as if to wake us from this stupor, is Chico’s turning to Groucho with pride, asking: ‘Ats-a some joke, eh Boss?’ Groucho is complimenting Chico not only on countering a ...”

“... drinking. And the ‘fastness’ was a habit that continued into his adult life. Peirce drank, he may later have used cocaine, he womanised, he could be violent (one of his servants sued him for assault), he was at the least careless, if not actually dishonest with other people’s money. Brent goes so far as to wonder whether he ...”

“... eight years after the publication of the Life and 24 years after The Garden and the City, he may be said to have made his major contribution. Rogers’s claim to the succession, if it is a claim, cannot be thought audacious or premature. After more than a century of scholarly neglect, Pope enjoyed considerable attention during the ascendancy of the New ...”

“... classic of Fin-de-Siècle gothic. For various reasons, they have been led to expect that they may receive important information regarding it at each of the leylines’ nodal points in turn. And do they? Well, sort of. At Lachrimae Christi, Cambridge (‘25th in the league table of college equities. And falling’), they meet up with Hinton’s former ...”

“... as Politburo minutes of that time, to both of which I had been refused access the previous April. May promises made that autumn have not been kept. The KGB, military and foreign affairs archives remain administratively separate from the other state archives, and access is extremely difficult. And we still await the Presidential of Kremlin archives, promised ...”

“... and this, in turn, leads to widespread paranoia, as each person maligns others who he thinks may be gossiping behind his back. Complementing chakari and flowing from it, but lying on a horizontal rather than vertical social axis, is the other main institution, afno manchhe. There is a strong distinction made between ‘us’, who are ...”