“... 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 ...”

“... be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... onto other people.Such portentous reflections are pre-eminently relevant to the reception of what may otherwise seem a modest or even a specialised book about the Japanese architectural tradition. Indeed, the West has always been willing to acknowledge that Japanese architecture, whether the traditional kind or its extraordinary modernist production, was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Other Island), the playwrights listed above wrote about England as if they were English. There may be Irish resonances in Waiting for Godot, but Beckett set it in no man’s land and wrote it in France (and when required to make short trips home to Ireland was subject to depression and illness). Until recently, most great playwrights of Irish origin have ...”

“... Great Game has been played less energetically to the west of the Caspian but this may change, just as the calculations east of the Caspian are shifting again today. Parallels between Chechnya and Afghanistan are much drawn these days, both in Kremlin security circles and in the mountain redoubts of the south Caucasus – converging ...”

“... country to ‘strange adventures’. Nowadays the picture seems less clear. Imperial enthusiasm may have militated in favour of the Unionists, but it hardly created a ‘tidal wave’. Their massive majority in seats was based on a much less impressive preponderance of votes, and the same is true of their victory in the so-called ‘Khaki’ election of ...”

“... My Baby and Parsons’s previous novel, the ‘publishing sensation’ Man and Boy. Man and Boy may have been ‘universally acclaimed’ but it was clearly not widely read, since reviewers of One for My Baby seem not to have noticed the many features the book shares with its predecessor. Both novels are set in North London. Man and Boy was divided into ...”

“... leaders as a means of shifting the balance of power within their own parties. But whatever Blair may have achieved, Lafontaine ended up both disappointed and frustrated. The Greens simply failed to live up to his hopes: ‘my expectation that the Greens would join me in my effort to keep the coalition on a socio-ecological reform course turned out to be a ...”

“... connections and various under-the-counter arrangements became a national pastime. Marxist ideology may have emphasised production, but in the Soviet Union it was hierarchies of consumption (based on preferential access to goods) that mattered.3 From the citizens’ standpoint, the key decisions of Soviet-type governments were all about allocation: that is, who ...”

“... has set up a multitude of checkpoints around Baghdad, producing enormous queues of traffic. It may not be enough. When there was an explosion in the Foreign Ministry, just outside the office of the General Council’s interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, it was first blamed on a rocket-propelled grenade. But it turned out to have been caused by half a ...”

“... separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric ...”

“... regarded as detritus. Dispersal has cut them off not only from the past, but from the future. They may have some way to go, as detritus, but since the island doesn’t boast a recycling plant, they will remain for the duration what they already are. They constitute the stuff of death rather than the stuff of life. Narrative keeps fresh the capacity for memory ...”