“... To interfere seems to mean constraining the perfectly reasonable choices that individuals must be allowed to make for themselves; not to interfere looks like accepting that there is nothing we can do about grotesquely unequal distributions of income; pleading that the real world is more complicated than this seems evasive. But what happens if you turn this ...”

“... forbidding basalt walls. These dramatic fortifications – built following the town’s capture by the great Saljuq Malik Shah in 1088 – remain uncluttered and defiant on the southern side: their dark ramparts can be seen from miles away. I remember driving to Diyarbakir as a student in 1967, when the walls were still ...”

“... Eight years ago, at Buaile nam Bodach on Barra, the landlady at the B& B had said, ‘My great-aunt was cleared from Pabbay’ – the next island but two to the south, the third-last joint in the backbone of ‘the Long Island’ of the Outer Hebrides. I was researching my book On the Crofters’ Trail at the time, collecting from people whatever their grand or great-grandparents had told them about the High-land Clearances, when landlords desperate to increase the income from their land forced many thousands of small tenants from their homes by a mixture of bribery, threats and the torching of their thatch, their roof-timbers and their looms ...”

“... force it told the incident-packed story of an inspired and inspiring career cut off at 44 by a self-destructive death. It showed what confusion there was in the early development of a young artist of limited talent and uncertain direction. It demonstrated how he found within himself an intuition of the course he had to take, an uncharted course for ...”

“... window-cleaners, janitors and waiters whose lives and deaths would normally have gone unrecorded by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States, the newspaper of record for much of the nation. The Times is declaring itself as a paper for all New Yorkers, all Americans, and is paying proper homage to the ubiquity of death and the mournful ...”

“... Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by stopping short of art. Where Modernism was enchanted by affinities with the art of the past, and offered itself as a climactic ...”

“... They buy and sell portable objects that can easily cost more than a castle or two. They survive by outwitting some of the world’s most cunning and ruthless manipulators of wealth, and they also know how to charm the old rich, key sources of supply. When they deal in the work of living artists they shape the careers of some of the most charismatic and ...”

“... the New York Times, Polygon and Codeword in the Times, plus a couple of others. I do it strictly by the clock so it doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and I don’t take it very seriously – I have till now resisted the endless offers to pay for a subscription that would allow me to track my scores, share my results and compare my performance with ...”

“... of other cashiers sat the manager, a kindly, depressive middle-aged man who sorted all the bets by hand, totted up the wins and losses on a calculator and kept a doleful eye on the rest of us. He didn’t say much. Only very occasionally did he intervene. I have three distinct memories of working there. The first is of the afternoon in March when Desert ...”

“... she was much more proud of being the first prime minister with a science degree than she was to be the first woman prime minister – and then as a barrister. But it was also a matter of temperament. She liked to badger people, picking away at the same few threads until something started to give. Moore writes of her governing style: ‘She used every ...”

“... Theater on the Air might have noticed a short announcement: the show that evening was going to be an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. A lead-in paragraph followed: ‘We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet ...”

“... planning’, ‘riot’, ‘fire’, ‘stand by’, ‘stand down’, ‘prisoners’, ‘escape’, ‘abscond’ and ‘Home Secretary’. To many of these words it is necessary to respond. With deliberate gravity, so as to impress John, with whom I share an office, and who almost wrecked the whole ...”

“... can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is ...”

“... quite dies but hibernates, latent in all those millions of people and thousands of texts, ready to be potentiated by various events, some more accountable or predictable than others: the Union of the Parliaments (1707), the Scottish Renaissance embodied in MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from ...”

“... the entire philosophical vocabulary including words like ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ is challenged by the titles of the two recent books by Derrida, De l’esprit and Psyché, both published in France in 1987. Of Spirit reflects on whether this vocabulary can really be avoided, and it does ...”