“... scrupulousness in testing the sensitivity of their model to changes in its quantitative parameters may make us overlook the fact that its qualitative assumptions are hardly subjected to scrutiny at all. This is like a manufacturer claiming that his jojoba-cardamom-and-asses-yogurt rejuvenating thigh balm damages the environment less than using the ...”

“... and the elderly, Europe’s diversity is at its greatest.’ His severity in this field may put him most at odds with his potential electors for the presidency. Eleven out of 12 EU members, he reports – guess the odd one out – are seeking social compacts with their trade unions, and there is a powerful dynamic behind the move to make these ...”

“... so years. (It was some of the favourite reading of Charles X, the last of the Bourbon kings.) What may be reckoned bad luck, though, is for this harmless, foolish, and not un-endearing relic of a dead fashion, to have been resurrected under the auspices of the MLA, as a masterpiece of cultural criticism and a trail-blazing feminist manifesto. Mme de ...”

“... there is only a contradiction here if either explanation is regarded as sufficient, whereas both may be necessary. The godfather of the IEA, Antony Fisher, had a genius for picking up economic ideas second-hand and turning in a nice profit by marketing them properly. The theory of economic liberalism was one example. This was cribbed from Hayek and ...”

“... contribution is an enormous account of four 18th-century female aristocrats, from which we may draw as many inferences about aristocracy as we can or wish to. The women are Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, the grandson of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle. The main story starts with the ...”

“... interpretation of Berkeley’s position, because it credits him with a view of perception which may be ours but certainly is not his. His view was one that could hardly have been formulated in this century. He began by arguing that the perceptible qualities which the materialist attributes to physical objects are all in the mind of the perceiver. According ...”

“... other hand, there is no such clause in his contract, though – which is a different matter – he may be subject to certain codes of behaviour, may have an obligation towards ‘truth’ in some sense or other of that word. Autobiography and biography appear, thus, to be very dissimilar genres; and as a ...”

“... hit from him will do more than months of routine pounding from lumbering leader-writers. This may be common knowledge. But is it true? After all, media experts of every hue – and not just those who see the press as the poodle of the powerful – have long been questioning the radical potential of mass culture. Many enjoin scepticism towards all ...”

“... Slateford, a village in Kincardineshire. There he is involved with two women. One is a local girl, May, the mill-owner’s daughter. She is trained in the domestic virtues and will, as she promises, make John a ‘good wife’. The other woman is a cosmopolitan Russian, Elizavyeta. ‘Cultured, widely read in three languages, without religion,’ she has heard ...”

“... with mild grey streets, to the veiled lustre of the Forth and the pale gold lands beyond, may under certain skies be revealed in such kindliness that urbanity puts on a pastoral light and one can almost hear the bleating of sheep, and yet be not moved to cry Absit omen ... But once in alternate years there is a Saturday morning when Edinburgh is ...”

“... economic department during the upswing, and took no action to avert the crisis before it broke. It may or may not have been his fault. The fact remains that, after two years in the Treasury, the basic assumptions underlying his management of the economy were in ruins. His unnecessary resignation after a trivial breach of ...”

“... Pinter directing Sweet Bird of Youth, and brilliantly – suggests a general awareness that there may currently be a hole where our theatre’s heart should be. That declaration of intent comes, not in one of Williams’s purple prefaces, but as a stage direction in the middle of a speech from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as the passively desperate Brick absorbs a ...”

“... the inference: what it is reasonable to do in the light of one set of beliefs and desires may not be reasonable when further reasons for action are adduced. So we cannot represent the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, premissed on a particular pair of belief and desire, with an unqualified ‘Doing a is desirable.’ Instead, Davidson ...”

“... than the Americans (not that they would want me to be). However brilliant French historians may indeed have been in the past half-century (or more precisely since the founding of Annales in 1929), they seem to me to be inferior to their North American colleagues in one respect, and that is in the geographical scope of the research which is undertaken in ...”

“... Society lost the capacity to adapt, locking itself into one mould of greed and competition. ‘We may be just trundling along on a dead end which suddenly cuts off the whole of the human race very violently and rapidly.’ Unrestricted population growth, or pollution, are as likely to bring humanity to that dead end as nuclear war. And is there no way ...”