“... means independence, and that means not having to depend on others. (Some of our best pleasures may come from dependencies. The state’s concern is only that we should not have them forced upon us.) It’s a conception that brings together what liberal political philosophers have more usually tended to see as ‘two disparate conceptual ...”

“... in the cinema with which Sennett opens could be interpreted in the opposite way: the audience may have flinched from the sight of a mechanical hand because they were still able to feel for someone who had suffered such a loss, despite the ‘gory war epic’ they had just sat through. Realistic film imagery of victims sometimes corresponds, in ...”

“... happen if they find out about us?’ I ask him. ‘I think they will fine us,’ he says. ‘They may also want to talk to you.’ The Chevy cruises – promenades – at 50 kilometres an hour. She returns relatively uncompetitive fuel economy numbers of eight km to the litre. L. cranes over the bench-seat and asks me what sort of dishes we Britons enjoy. As ...”

“... certainly does not apply to the former estates, and the Oder-Neisse line is fixed. Leningrad may have become St Petersburg again, but Wroclaw will not revert to Breslau. Meanwhile, the Hohenzollerns have much less chance of staging a comeback than several Ruritanian dynasties with an equally grubby record. Lord Vansittart and A.J.P. Taylor can rest ...”

“... out of his niggling, pumped-up disputes with Hardy’s other biographers. And for all I know, he may even be right in some of them; we can never really be sure what went on inside Max Gate. Hardy was notoriously self-protective, destroying Emma’s diaries, ghosting his own biography, keeping his heart out of his letters. Seymour-Smith’s insistence on ...”

“... to make their pieces sound ‘right’. An empirical modal understanding of harmonic coherence may possibly be the only true common language of 20th-century music, as vital to Britten as (appearances notwithstanding) to Boulez, shared by Messiaen and Maxwell Davies. This is not perhaps to say much; but it is clear that the French school, going back at ...”

“... could he have argued that he was doing his country much of a favour. A third consideration may obtain. What if, as is generally the case, your country has its repulsive and attractive sides, and so do your friends, but there is something wrong with you? Some crucial bit of the moral or the rational animal that is, in your own case, simply ...”

“... blow themselves apart playing with them. Visitors who travel further up the pot-holed road in what may be Xieng Khouang’s only taxi, an ageing Russian Volga, will have no trouble spotting Laos’s second claim to international renown: opium. At Nong Het, close to the Vietnamese border, a woman is weeding a field of purple and white opium poppies in front of ...”

“... tentative gull’s feet; tide of familial happiness seeps in. But although the narrative formula may be trite (Little House on the Prairie Goes to Newfoundland; The Waltons Put Out to Sea), this energetic, anarchic, quirky novel is not. We are seduced, in part, by the characters; in part by the writer’s intelligence and wit (one character, an expat ...”

“... of their town. The second day was worse – perhaps the worst day of John Williams’s life. He may have understood his own significance to his captors; he was an important man, respected in his community and throughout New England. He could be exchanged for some prisoner valuable to the French; but why these innocents, these babies and women? What use were ...”

“... skilled, are committed to chronology, but Gill’s reduction of his chapter titles to bare dates may indicate the fragile significance that Wordsworth himself attached to dates as such. Where Lamb considered that the chronological was the only possible arrangement for a collection of poems, since the order in which they were written constituted the history ...”

“... men doing their unheroic best in an impossible situation, would have been anathema to him. Namier may have helped to erect a fresh 20th-century myth, but in his Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) he satisfyingly laid another to rest. The Whig interpretation, elaborated by ...”

“... to anger at the sight of their smiling faces, cuffing and hustling them away from the cameras.9 May. Miss Shepherd’s funeral is at Our Lady of Hal, the Catholic church round the corner. The service has been slotted into the ten o’clock Mass so that, in addition to a contingent of neighbours, the congregation includes what I take to be regulars: the fat ...”

“... hopeful thinking runs counter to the deepest convictions of Western culture. Christian theology may have loosened its hold over the collective mind, but the belief that man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble, is as strong now as it ever has been. The professionalised view of history, with its accounts of selfishness and deceit, has ...”

“... diary-writing has its effect on the life of the person who keeps one, and the function of a diary may not be the same as the rational justification. Beatrice Webb, for example, used her diary for deep introspection. Hugh Dalton used his sometimes as a private seminar, for working out new ideas, on other occasions as a kind of mirror, in order to practise a ...”