“... translate into English). It is a book which, thanks to its careful preparation and construction, may be enjoyed at many levels and many times over. And yet the consequences of the prolonged period of composition have not all been wholly beneficial. In the first place, over the 27 years of parturition, Braudel has lost some of his notes and ...”

“... lives in those years, and to show how an understanding of the Seventies in this historical context may help us to see where we are going next.’ The decade was, he tells us, ‘in fact the most important decade of the 20th century’. Later he qualifies this and calls the Seventies ‘arguably the most important decade of the 20th century’. He uses the ...”

“... this article is intended to provide instead of opinions. My ensuing truths, my later rightnesses, may not be such obviosities, but unless they live up to this one’s objectivity, I shall accept that I have failed. Now, what gives me the right to imply that I speak with such authority on the rights and wrongs, the truths and delusions of broadcasting? There ...”

“... the curtest and most essential boiling-down of the bardic imprecation, is an idiom which we may or may not owe to the playing fields of wherever, but the Opies have collected many an example of the death-dealing taunt. Their enabling factor is that they aren’t normally for real, however near the bone. In most cases ...”

“... it was the craze of the century). Science and technology, too, have had to be set aside. This may be thought to be more questionable, for though the immediate impact of technological change was small (yet Norman cahiers of 1789 grumbled bitterly about English textile machinery), those hints of the future which are discernible surely require comment. Why ...”

“... very much. Fantasies as well as facts can make people ill. What this book shows is that whatever may (or may not) be our genetic pre-dispositions, the particular set of constraints (legal and moral) which surround the concepts of ‘incest’, ‘rape’, ‘paedophilia’, ‘homosexuality’ in contemporary American ...”

“... after a trial at the Old Bailey, receiving nine-month custodial sentences.A year later, in May 1978, Ridgewell was himself arrested after a tip-off: he had fallen out with one of the men who helped him sell on the items that he had stolen, using the same method the workers at the Bricklayers’ Arms had supposedly employed. On 22 January 1980 the ...”

“... the Balkans, Andrew Port suggests that their ‘otherwise admirable reckoning with the Holocaust may have unwittingly desensitised Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.’This ...”

“... Even her portraits gave her a Caucasian makeover, airbrushing racial distinctiveness – she may have had facial tattoos – to make her conform to English expectations. Her cultural rebirth was not so much a gesture of accord between Britain and the Indigenous people of Virginia as a symbol of conquest and dominion over the American wilderness and its ...”

“... respond to market signals – in fact, it usually does – and conversely a privately owned firm may choose, or be compelled, to make hires, purchases and sales via non-market channels. For instance, China’s largest car manufacturer, SAIC, a state-owned firm, competes with both private and government-controlled firms to sell its vehicles. In Western ...”

“... damned if you don’t, lowers the narrative stakes. On the other, it suggests that, since there may be nowhere for Black people to be free, it’s better to focus on the here and now, the bardo of the present, or, in the words of the poet Claude McKay, to embrace futility with fervour by ‘dying, but fighting back’. ‘Before the sun went down,’ one ...”

“... where problems of crowding, poverty and racial tension are endemic, riots do not start. New York may not have found the preventive cure for rioting, but it was clear in those tumultuous long hot summers of the late Sixties that the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with ...”

“... describes, claims a self-sufficiency and recognises no obligation to be more than itself. Now this may seem to be an easy task, to describe a series of landscapes but to withhold any explanation beyond the grasp of a child, and at the simplest level we examine this testimony as we examine that of the children and other naïfs who inform Wordsworth’s Lyrical ...”

“... heritage, class identity or historical destiny in the creation of a necessary myth. The myth may be necessary in order to fortify the ambitions of the restless, to gratify the complacency of the satisfied or to console the amour-propre of the dispossessed. The functions of the past, in this sense, are governed by the needs of the present. Much general ...”

“... Parsons of Grub Street I would like to point out that this is not my third, but my 19th book. May I also express a fogeyish surprise at seeing myself described as ‘Ernest’ in the headline. I first started writing headlines 70 years ago, but in my time we did not indulge in first-name familiarities on the lines of ‘Sidney Goes to the Gallows’ and ...”