“... I was born in London on the 20th of May, 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of The History of British India.’ The father-author thus announced at the beginning of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography dominated his life from early childhood on. Did he in any sense author his son’s life as he authored his books? John Stuart Mill wrote his own Life in large part to work out an answer to that question ...”

“... among analytic philosophers (he is often referred to as ‘the smartest philosopher in America’) may, at this point, still expect that these large questions will, as usual, rapidly be reformulated so as to abandon the non-technical level at which they were initially asked. But the very next paragraph shifts the tone. ‘Our various questions,’ Nozick ...”

“... This, while not overt class struggle, was undertaken precisely to avoid such struggle, and one may well argue therefore that class conflict between masters and slaves was a determinant of behaviour. (For an analogy, consider the behaviour of the Polish authorities between December 1970 and August 1980: although there was little overt struggle against the ...”

“... and ignorance of the Treasury knights, who, again in Macmillan’s words, ‘see the error which may be committed by doing something, and therefore...say “let us commit the crowning error of not doing anything at all.” ’ Of course, even in 1935 public expenditure was hardly a negligible element in the nation’s transactions. It accounted for some 25 ...”

“... and has therefore chosen to let his own work be beyond his understanding.’ That ‘therefore’ may well give us pause. The corresponding attitude for the reader is perhaps stated when Pilgermann and his friend discuss the tiled design they have built in Antioch: ‘May it not be that the best way of conducting oneself ...”

“... In the Economist of 27 May 1978, details were published of a secret report by a Conservative Party policy group on the nationalised industries. Each industry would be allocated a minimum rate of return on capital; managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict ...”

“... Lewin succeeded in winning War Cabinet authority for a change in the Rules of Engagement on 2 May to allow hunter-killer submarine attacks on any Argentine surface ships outside Argentine territorial waters. That was how the General Belgrano came to be destroyed later the same day despite the fact that London knew it had been heading toward home waters ...”

“... betrayal of life and the novelist’s treachery to those who surround him. But prudent readers may prefer not to discover The Counterlife’s intricate surprises in advance. The novel’s main character – need you be told? – is Nathan Zuckerman, whose reputed similarities to Roth himself have already been amply described. I remember my English ...”

“... the right course. Thereafter our assumptions grow exponentially. The rule book says that a pilot may not connect his INS to autopilot without a fix on a VHF Omni Range radio beacon (VOR), but we assume that this rule, too, was disregarded. We now further assume that the pilot made a further off-the-cuff decision to disregard even his own self-devised flight ...”

“... said during his final trial: ‘He hath been as a star at which the world hath gazed; but stars may fall, nay they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide.’ During his life Ralegh built up a reputation for fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on ...”

“... of them and of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.’ Al-Afghani may have been exaggerating. But he knew from his experiences in India and Egypt how quickly the West’s seemingly innocuous traders and bankers could turn into diplomats and soldiers. The feckless shah had already compromised Iran’s relative immunity to ...”

“... collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other’ – postwar writers found an apt description of social life as a whole. When Betty Friedan ...”

“... example, brought frequent reprimands, but he remained unkempt; the mess a painter inevitably makes may have secretly been a compelling attraction. That Cézanne became an artist at all, rather than the provincial lawyer he might have been had Louis-Auguste had his way, is due in part to the remarkable fact that his schoolmate at the Collège Bourbon was Emile ...”

“... in European societies. Given that the poorest 5 per cent of the population in a Western country may be better off than the richest 5 per cent in Africa or India, it is always going to be difficult to establish a popular platform for the discussion of global redistribution. Perhaps for this reason, over the past decade the debate about global inequality has ...”

“... over the next four years. The biggest single discovery in the history of Russian oil was made in May 1965: the super-giant Samotlor field, at its peak in the 1980s the world’s second largest, and even now among the top half-dozen, producing more than 35 million tons of crude a year. West Siberian oil quickly came to play a central role in the Soviet ...”