“... new internal discipline, resulted in prices rebounding to $30 a barrel, but in real terms this was small beer. In response, Cheney’s Energy Task Force did no more than recapitulate an argument made by Jimmy Carter: demand is growing, oil is not scarce, but it is unevenly distributed. Carter had emphasised conservation, at least in the first instance, as a ...”

“... social action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?’Many years later, in a letter to Stephen Spender, Auden described Yeats as ‘my own devil of unauthenticity’ and referred to the ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’ in his work. As he embarked on his poem in memory of Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of ...”

“... rage over immigration; an anachronistic constitutional order that gives far too much power to small states. All these accounts have a grain of truth, but none captures the full dimensions of America’s crisis, which is not merely political but spiritual, the latest chapter in an older struggle over what sort of country it wants to be – if, indeed, it ...”

“... will suffer only one defect per million. ‘Transferred to the arena of municipal waste,’ said Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, Zero Waste forces attention onto the whole life cycle of products. Zero Waste encompasses producer responsibility, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within a single framework. It breaks away from the ...”

“... of the images d’Epinal – the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Wenceslas Square, the Crown of St Stephen; the liberator Pope, the philosopher President, the Nobel electrician – with which the media could uplift audiences in the West. Kadare might be a better writer than Havel, but apart from a few readers in France, who cared? No Montenegrin estate lay ...”

“... what they do remains a development of these relatively primitive manoeuvres. I have paraded this small selection of technical terms so that you can say that you neither want nor need them; if you do feel that, you differ from professional narratologists, who rejoice in the apparatus and the neologisms; they have what Gerald Prince, a senior narratologist ...”

“... owe each other as ‘persons’: a game of unreason that had to be kept out of the public square. Stephen Frosh, an academic and former clinical psychologist at the Tavistock, observes that psychoanalysis ‘accentuates the power of the therapist to such a degree that it appears to validate authoritarianism’.Nowhere do we find more anxiety about ...”

“... she wrote in one post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him ...”

“... them to wait in the house: ‘A taxi will come and take you to Milan.’ After two hours, a small truck arrived and they wedged themselves inside, but they had only gone a few kilometres when the driver and his mate stopped the vehicle and threw all the Kosovars out. Fatmir and his companions walked to Lecce, thinking they might change some money and ...”

“... three issuing banks: the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Clydesdale Bank. Small countries with big ambitions but few natural resources need ingenious banking systems. The history of the Netherlands, Venice, Florence and Scotland show this – and so does the tragic recent story of Iceland. ‘In the 17th century, when English and ...”

“... you say, it’s a very American thing.Hugely so.You have written amusingly about what a small-time, English contender Larkin seemed to be, by comparison. Some of the same kind of ambition, but so discreetly felt and so discreetly concealed.You remember Lowell trying to cultivate Larkin, sending him a copy of The Dolphin or something? Larkin ...”