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“... get out that one corner or another is the place to go to get hold of your drug of choice: this may be your only option if, say, you’re a first-time buyer in a big city or haven’t yet managed to find a network you trust. The quality of the drugs varies dramatically and the chances of being ripped off, arrested or physically attacked are relatively ...”

“... end of the century, in an 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis. It was in May of that year that Oscar Wilde received a ‘very pathetic’ letter from Lord Alfred Douglas, of whom he had hitherto been no more than a casual acquaintance, appealing to him for help with regard to a rentboy who was threatening blackmail, and inaugurating ...”

“... there is, he finds, a ‘mood of optimism’ taking hold of Sierra Leone: an end to the conflict may even be in sight. Confirming this forecast, a peace accord was signed on 30 December last year between the President of the country and the RUF leader, and the five-year-old war was ended. If this accord continues to hold, as at present, it will be because ...”

“... make guesses about the causes of burps, rumbles, farts, sweats, swellings, flushes and rashes. We may even get a glance, by way of a nasty accident, at a bit of bone. But in other ways we know our insides hardly at all. We are vague about what they look like. Even when we have the words – spleen, kidney and so forth – the associated pictures are often ...”

“... consideration came the reply: ‘the outstanding mediocrity in the Party’. Trotsky’s contempt may in part be explained by the wounds which his own pride had suffered from the growth of Stalin’s influence among the party rank and file after Lenin’s death in January 1924. On the other hand, not even Stalin’s closest allies considered intellect and ...”

“... In England not many people read books. If you look around you in the Tube you may see someone, usually a man, reading a thriller by Robert Ludlum, or someone else, usually a woman, making her way through one of Catherine Cookson’s romances. On a good day there will be one person reading a novel by Anita Brookner. But that’s about ...”

“... deserve it. It doesn’t seem wrong to call W.B. Yeats a great poet, and in certain contexts he may be called a great Irish poet, though most of the time it might seem odd to insist that Dante was a great Italian, or Shakespeare a great English, poet, partly because we vaguely think of them as transcending nationality. But Yeats was the necessary great poet ...”

“... This is a rather relaxed book. As such, it may disappoint those who know the author through his brilliant contributions to early Stuart history, or his recent principled interventions in debate in the House of Lords. Its aim, a truly ambitious one, is to trace the continuities between the liberalism of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and that of Liberal Democratic politics today ...”

“... life, and this seems correct. They provide the most sustained theme in his variegated career, and may be seen as a point of convergence for most of the tendencies of his mind. To consider the computers is to consider Babbage. Indeed his story falls under a triple rubric that belongs to computers from Babbage onwards: software, hardware, and applications. The ...”

“... Duchesse de Guermantes and finds her going to a party. He blurts out that he is mortally ill and may not be seeing her again. She ignores this news and gives him a smiling farewell as she gets into her carriage. E.M. Forster thought the scene one of the most odious in the novel, or rather in the Novel, and he seems to assume, rather naively, that Proust is ...”

“... the implementation of GCSE, and about the disruption caused by industrial action. For Londoners, 8 May marked the opportunity to participate in the direct election of a local education authority: the result, an overwhelming endorsement of existing ILEA policies, should provide Kenneth Baker with plenty to think about. And for thousands of students there is, as ...”

“... remains – why the history of thought? ... The enterprise seems not only unfashionable; it may even be called élitist.’ The charge of ‘élitism’ (surely in itself a little old-fashioned?) arises because ‘the writers of these texts may have belonged to the ruling “élite”.’ It is evidently bad form to ...”

“... some particularly penetrating points. A major question arises for every type of content a belief may have. What is the relation between theories of those contents which individuate them by reference to truth conditions, and theories which claim to individuate them without any such reference? Are such theories in competition, or not? And if not, how should ...”

“... Germany. But rugby, with its reliance on physical attributes, has no such capacity to shock. Japan may shore up their side with the odd Tongan or Fijian but they will never compete on equal terms with the All Blacks; the Ivory Coast would probably struggle to beat an Australian side with their legs tied together. Nevertheless, when two teams are of roughly ...”

“... effort to fuse them into one.‘Writing a biography of Michel Foucault,’ he confesses, ‘may seem paradoxical. Did he not, on numerous occasions, challenge the notion of the author, thereby dismissing the very possibility of a biographical study?’ These are Eribon’s first two sentences: but nowhere in the book does he explore, let alone ...”