“... view that the best government is the least government. Whatever else initiatives like these may achieve, each has the virtue of allowing individuals to pursue welfare as they see fit: risky retirement investments or safe ones, open classrooms or highly structured ones etc. On this view, the real virtue of the competitive free market is not so much what ...”

“... but there is no voice without it; the dead leave us the voice boxes that are their poems, but they may not be enough. Though Heaney’s voice could not be more distinctive, he also sounds like other people. Muldoon only ever really sounds like himself. Only ever really sounding like oneself is a very odd thing to do. Muldoon’s fascinating Oxford ...”

“... It seems heroically optimistic to expect new institutions to avoid these problems. We may regret the failure of political globalisation to keep pace with economic globalisation, but political globalisation can’t be achieved by decree, and it would be more sensible to seek reforms that could increase well-being without requiring nations to ...”

“... capital of Dhi Qar, when shells explode inside the compound. He endures four days under attack in May, penned into the compound as Italian soldiers and private security contractors fight desperately against a barrage of shelling and gunfire. They are eventually saved by the arrival of a single airplane gunship that dissolves the insurgency in a matter of ...”

“... but he does it with extraordinary gallantry. If he has, or gathers, a band of the emulous, we may look for some capital sport.’ James goes on to wish Symonds had more humour – ‘it really is the saving salt’ – but acknowledges, with a little humour of his own, that ‘the great reformers never have it.’ Leon Edel, the editor of the ...”

“... is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an ...”

“... affair. One of the reasons for this apparent willingness to subordinate her own career for so long may be that Hillary Clinton seems by instinct to be more of an administrator, an enabler and a mobiliser than a politician who is driven by a distinctive policy agenda. The criticism most often levelled against her by pundits and voters in America is that she is ...”

“... children, but it set him up for a life of ever greater derangement and a dreadful end. Schumann may not have been insane, but he was certainly odd. His taciturnity was bafflingly extreme. He would let people talk on at embarrassing length before responding with a blunt or irrelevant few words. With the garrulous, self-absorbed Wagner, he ‘stayed as good ...”

“... of the lawless deeds of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. Conveniently assonant as the two names may be, the crimes of Naples are not those we associate with the Cities of the Plain, and Saviano is not the righteous man who withdraws when God steps in to incinerate the sinful townsfolk. On the contrary, he seems to be drawn to what he abhors, and does ...”

“... Middle Ages. The urban, literate, inscribing culture of antiquity, however much its existence may have been predicated on the Roman imperial war machine, was fundamentally civilian in outlook and affect; the fifth century witnessed its catastrophic impoverishment and the triumph of a military world where martial success was the main currency. For the ...”

“... Hofmannsthal comes across as a tremendously unappealing figure.† To begin with, he was, if I may put it in British Rail parlance, the wrong sort of prodigy, i.e. not a rebel or iconoclast, but a young man who pleased and impressed his elders. He was a dishy and precocious 16-year-old – still chaperoned by his banker father – when he first appeared at ...”

“... more fitting to ‘thirtysomethings’. Indeed, Mullin’s unworldliness is shallower than it may seem. As the new millennium dawns, he laments that ‘I am entering a period of unprecedented obscurity’ but hopes that ‘my eclipse will be temporary.’ Eclipses often are. Mullin dreams of worldly glory despite recognising the limits on his ...”

“... Putnam once observed. One way out of this dilemma is to throw over Plato for Aristotle. There may be no perfect mathematical entities in our world, but there are plenty of imperfect approximations. We can draw crude circles and lines on a chalkboard; we can add two apples to three apples, even if they are not identical, and end up with five. By ...”

“... to constructing – or manipulating – cabinet support, before announcing the application in May 1967. The announcement created an expectation of devaluation, worsening the problems created by yet another downturn in the balance of payments. By October, the Treasury believed that devaluation was inevitable. It was finally conceded in November, with ...”

“... meant. Williams seems to believe in the magic he so frequently describes; you suspect that he may even have performed some of the spells. In his sequence of ‘spiritual thrillers’, written mostly in the 1930s, he seems sinisterly close to his sinister villains; one of his early poems is an ironic hymn to Satan. Evil fascinated him a little more than it ...”