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“... negative. Again, I believe he is wrong – or at any rate I hope he is. These, of course, are the major issues facing his country, and much of what he has to say reflects at least a measure of popular opinion. Willy-nilly, his beliefs, ambitions and actions are being inscribed in history. Khasbulatov would – does still – call himself a reformer, and ...”

“... capitalism’, claiming allegiance to a mixed economy in which the state would play the major role and capitalism would be confined to shops and small enterprises. Rutskoi in particular has long made plain his detestation of most aspects of market behaviour. Lebed claims to support reform, but when questioned, falls back on statist ...”

“... When he started off in particle physics, the field was in ‘a Tolstoyan phase’. Major discoveries were reached with home-made instruments for detecting cosmic rays: particles were accelerated free of charge by astronomical processes. Later came large, man-made accelerators. Particle physics entered ‘a long Napoleonic phase’ and became ...”

“... The most determined will arrange to disappear from the face of the earth, like Thomas Pynchon, a major force in modern fiction who is, to all biographical intents and purposes, a cipher. The morbid secretiveness of authors as a class compared, say, to film-stars, sportsmen or pop-musicians is mysterious. Are they ashamed of their lives? Do they feel that ...”

“... extremely few and surely inadvertent rather than ignorant. What I shall linger on, however, is a major change which remains unmade: that of the English title for Proust’s great work. Remembrance of Things Past is an improper title, long familiar to English readers but dispensable – it is not much used as a title, since most people, I fancy, talk of the ...”

“... Victor’s conception – an alfresco event, held 3000 feet up in the Vosges mountains – was a major in the Napoleonic Army. Soon, he had gone up to being General Hugo, and was showing considerable brutality in occupied Spain, before establishing himself as a hero in his son’s eyes by his futile defence of Thionville after the defeat on the ‘morne ...”

“... Gall (or St Gallen) was a town that ran on talk. It had no printing press, was some distance from major communication routes and about fifty miles from Zurich, the heart of the Swiss Reformation. But this relative isolation didn’t limit St Gallers’ hunger for news and rumour. Stories of Italian wars and Ottoman intrigues were swapped in the street and in ...”

“... him say: ‘The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never contemplated.’ I heard Major-General Charles Swannack promise that his troops were going to ‘use a sledgehammer to smash a walnut’. I heard the Pentagon spokesman say: ‘This is not going to be your father’s Persian Gulf War.’ I heard that Saddam’s strategy against the ...”

“... Some of us who are neither historians nor political scientists have by chance become aware, as was John Adams at the time, that what happened in the US between 1776 and 1783 was so demonstrably different from what happened in France ten or twelve years later, that to call them both ‘revolutions’ is merely obfuscating. Professor Hill, every inch a ...”

“... Eco gives his story a solid foundation in the politics and theology of the early 14th century. John XXII is Pope in Avignon. A decision of his predecessor had opened a division among the Franciscans by relaxing the original Rule in respect of poverty. The Spiritual Franciscans, who adhered to the letter of the Rule, were condemned by ...”

“... the self-appointed guardians of the Rose and the Globe Theatres claim to be preserving. One of the major charges levelled by the Puritans against the playhouses of Shakespeare’s day was that they were involved in and encouraged idolatory: the worship of graven images. The appalling spectacle of famous actors and actresses praying over heaps of bricks and ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”

“... happened in January while reading about May, though it’s an oddity that the reader is given one major piece of information (about the termination of a pregnancy) that Mungo never discovers. A one-way imbalance of knowledge between reader and character can lend a narrative urgency but when the imbalance goes both ways the result is likely to be ...”

“... the fights he picks are too one-sided. It is true that he likes to point out that in each of his major wars (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq) he stayed the course when the doubters were writing his political obituary. But it was in each case just his obituary they were writing, and just a political one; the killing remained almost entirely the killing of unknowns ...”

“... signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in 1568, the eldest child in the family. His father was ...”