“... about 90 per cent of the territory of the other and both carried out extensive massacres – this may not be easy. A united Korea will inherit not only a Stasi legacy (on both sides), but also a history and memories of violence on a scale equal to that in the former Yugoslavia. Almost every family in Korea lost one or more members as a result of division and ...”

“... sent five thousand marines to Lebanon, and not a hair out of place. Dear Ike. This distinction may be a helpful one. Though Eisenhower might have been a moral coward on matters such as McCarthyism and segregation, he often expressed himself in private as a prisoner of public opinion and regarded colleagues like Nixon, for example, as distasteful political ...”

“... damned and celebrated as the signal text of the student and workers’ uprising in France in May 1968; discovered in the midst of that unshaped revolt, and especially after it, the book lasted. I read it for the first time in 1980, en route to London to talk to the punk group Gang of Four and the singer Lora Logic, and it was as if the story I was after ...”

“... diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares Davidson’s colloquial language with the artificial fancifulness of Georgian verse which, in Eliot’s words, caressed everything it touched, it is easy to understand his reaction. Not all the contributors to the Georgian ...”

“... surviving the Age of Aquarius), but as the age of the personality. ‘Whatever that was,’ they may well add. For posterity, let me explain about personality. It might be supposed that in order to be one, an individual ought to have one. If this was true in the past (was it? Was drinking too much and killing big fish evidence that Hemingway was someone we ...”

“... great barrier here is that the housing market has frozen solid, especially at the upper end, so it may be all but impossible to sell up. (This, note, despite 16 per cent inflation.) And if you do sell up, you can’t get your money out, except by currency fraud and at a punitive exchange rate. For all that, many do it: white people leak abroad and so does ...”

“... identify uncritically with the storm, the ‘dynamic of progress and reason’. Although Benjamin may have condensed Kant’s argument against Christian millenarianism into the image of the ‘blown-away angel’, he did not entirely concur with it. On the contrary, he can be seen as invoking Kant’s argument against the temporal end of history as a ...”

“... chose a biographer from outside his own party, but his and Anthony Howard’s political outlooks may have been closer to each other than Mr Horne’s and Macmillan’s ‘not very good’ Toryisms. After an undistinguished three years at Eton, a first in Mods at Oxford, a flirtation with Rome together with Ronnie Knox, a commission in the Grenadier Guards ...”

“... will have to go to the Grand Larousse to discover what a curious person Gance was. Market research may say that encyclopedias sell better if they appear impartial, and if they help children with their homework, but that is precisely why they have lost their intellectual hold on adults. They would be more influential if they made their tastes and their criteria ...”

“... candidate. Though they knew he had done well in the recent West Birmingham by-election, they may still have had a few qualms when they saw their man in the flesh. A photograph reproduced in Tam Dalyell’s peculiar but highly entertaining memoir of Crossman gives some idea of what he might have looked like. It shows the young Dick seated in the centre of ...”

“... concerned with the seemingly deep issue Schrödinger discussed. The pioneers of molecular biology may have imported analytical attitudes and techniques from the physical sciences, but they were problem-solvers, working at the laboratory bench to tease out the mechanism of heredity. Perutz, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the ...”

“... out. She calls Jigsaw, which has to do with her own early life, ‘a biographical novel’; and it may not be a coincidence that the book’s most sympathetic reviewers have been those who seem already to know her life story. ‘Truth,’ one of the characters remarks, ‘is such a feeble excuse for so many things.’ Bedford, always inclined to look down her ...”

“... loyalty’. Benazir’s description of her first meeting with Zia suggests how the Bhuttos may have underestimated him. a short, nervous, ineffectual-looking man whose pomaded hair was parted in the middle and lacquered to his head. He looked more like an English cartoon villain than an inspiring military leader. And he seemed so obsequious, telling ...”

“... and Japan all offer ample evidence of the failings of liberal political institutions. Democracy may now be dominant, but it is also deeply compromised in its major heartlands. Our liberal-democratic polities offer low levels of accountability and citizen influence when measured against democratic ideals, rather than against ailing autocracies. Fascism and ...”

“... in the same way. But here at once is the problem. Damage to body or property can be assessed. It may be difficult to assess the real damage to a person who loses a leg, or in the ‘pain and suffering’ (a legal expression) of someone laid low, say, by asbestosis, but judges and lawyers can have a stab at it by reckoning, for instance, how many days’ work ...”