“... has an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent. Such eminence may seem perverse, but it is not unintelligible. Putin’s authority derives, in the first place, from the contrast with the ruler who made him. From a Western standpoint, Yeltsin’s regime was by no means a failure. By ramming through a more sweeping ...”

“... opinions and rather narrow tastes. Nonetheless he was very good at teaching one how to write. He may have been wrong in some of his literary judgments and ignorant in some areas of literature but he was good at getting rid of what was superfluous or phoney in a piece of writing. And he would be very insulting if one came out with some bit of ...”

“... been behavioural exercises of the crudest sort that have helped me with my agoraphobia. When, in May, I started a three-month sabbatical from the London Review, I was still suffering the effects of that earlier wobbly: I was still having to be careful, and still having to fight off mini-wobblies and anxiety attacks more or less every time I went out. One of ...”

“... of world-shaking import.’ Ramsey ‘hated what he saw at Evanston’. He avoided insincerity, we may be sure, in his personal contacts on his many journeys, but he may have tolerated, or perhaps even not recognised, many of the misunderstandings and failures of communication which are inescapable in the conferences of ...”

“... of the menace. This script is quite moving to read. James Plunkett’s The Circus Animals may fairly be called a traditional novel, very skilful and good-hearted, quite challenging. It is bound to be a widely-read paperback, possibly an admired and popular television adaptation, like Plunkett’s celebrated Strumpet City: we would not want Pinter to ...”

“... but after the Revolution Locke faded from sight across the Channel. At home, however his fortunes may have gone up or down, the topics that he discussed came to constitute philosophy. Locke was no sceptic, in the philosopher’s sense of that word, but he surely was sceptical. English-language philosophy has been sceptical ever since. Locke set the ...”

“... Jarrell set it out like this at the end of his essay on Stevens: ‘A man who is a good poet at 40 may turn out to be a good poet at 60; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of ...”

“... the career of Saddam Hussein and the blunders of the Western countries which armed him, but they may have difficulty analysing the long-term effects of the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August on the Arab Gulf states. The ruling families seem no more inclined than before to open the door to real democratisation, whatever the pressures from their domestic critics ...”

“... fact, the people on whom this sort of thing is most unfair are the top executive directors. They may benefit from stock options, but they are not as a rule major shareholders. Their careers are likely to suffer whether they stay or leave, since if they stay they risk finding themselves taking orders from people they neither like nor, more ...”

“... that what Colombia needs is not new laws but the will to apply them. There are signs that the will may be developing. Extensive frauds have been uncovered in the social security system, and in the public services of Colombia’s main port, Barranquilla. The newspapers are exposing corruption with more determination than they have shown for a long time. Even ...”

“... where Wesley’s earlier novel The Camomile Lawn was set. As historical fiction A Sensible Life may well be compared with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years, a narrative of events in 1937 and 1938 which is the first of a planned trilogy spanning the war years. Both like to drip-feed us with nostalgia, and neither is poisonous. Both, too, tend to ...”

“... to say the least – especially since the Blake of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion may justifiably be claimed as a sister to Mary Wollstonecraft in the struggle to vindicate the rights of woman. And, most alarmingly in a book that advertises itself as a guide to the poetry as well as the life, it completely misses the point of the poem, which ...”

“... economies’. ‘The magic of the price system gets thousands of people to co-operate so that we may buy a pencil for a trifling sum.’ It was calculated in the 1950s that it would cost a do-it-yourself addict about fifty dollars to make a single wood-cased pencil. As late as 1771, at the beginning of the decade of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and of James ...”

“... it is worth pausing over, since it appears currently in the most varied intellectual circles, and may not be as turbid as it looks. It concerns our confusions about ‘the referent’. His book, Prendergast says, ‘is not about the referent “Paris”, but about certain symbolic representations, various manifestations of the discursive category ...”

“... Watkins knows that the forms of victimisation are as variable and beautiful as a rainbow: anything may fall into the hands of his enemies – a teddybear, his name – and anyone may be his enemy. He and his chums contemplate self-defence against a teacher who likes to grip their balls while asking them questions – but ...”