“... Are these weapons dealers legitimate or black market? ‘It’s a grey zone,’ said Mueller. It may be no coincidence that the offices of a number of Middle Eastern businesses – airlines, import/export franchises – are located around the high-tide mark of Frankfurt’s red-light district. Scotland Yard, which was represented at the Warsaw conference but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of their kind, make a satisfying and legible symptom, and they affirm the hope that the personal may be the political. Mary is a tissue of reshuffled data from Wollstonecraft’s life. The heroine escapes from her family to solitude and books (‘Thomson’s Seasons, Young’s Night-Thoughts and Paradise Lost’), and finds an older woman, Ann, who seems ...”

“... was a Naval officer as Trelawney had been, but probably of a more sober and reliable type, which may have been just as well. After physically assaulting an unpopular lieutenant Treawney went absent, by his own account, while still a midshipman, deserting his ship in the Seychelles and living with an exotic lady called Zela who was always clad in striped ...”

“... for the lovely atomic spread in the gut as the liquor explodes within. Vodka is a great drink. It may lack the subtleties of Scotch and the bourgeois splendour of brandy: but in its craggy purity, it stands on a peak of its own. Pokhlebkin did not set out to write a history of vodka, however. His commission, in the early Eighties, was both more limited and of ...”

“... were hoping for conversions, and it is suggested that the millenarian current strong in England may have had an influence on Jewish thinking. Old Testament thinking certainly had an influence on the nascent English imperialism of Cromwell and his fellow Puritans. Another Chosen People was taking the stage, and Ireland was undergoing the fate of Canaan long ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is the description of Shoe’s childhood in Oldham, an unlovely textile town which, like Wigan, may have been built expressly to be the butt of jokes. There is much of the flavour of Oldham life in this first chapter. Shoe’s grandfather, it seems, was stoned to death by little boys. Her father, when courting her mother, placed a Valentine’s Day token ...”

“... have left grimly romantic records, so that carrying a knife, and readily using it in a scrap, may just have been what all tough sailors do. Even so, we had a problem. The explanation that the twenty-year-old killer had knocked about where life was cheap didn’t quite bring his action into focus: our experience of fights, aggro, rumbles, of the serious ...”

“... socialist ownership in future, given the intrinsic weakness of the socialist fabric. The rationale may, on the other hand, be merely cosmetic: to save the face of the Communist Party, or to save the jobs of millions of local Party functionaries whose loyalty would collapse if enterprising yuppies and profit-seeking producers took over their offices (this is ...”

“... 1975, I commented that ‘not only the voyeur and the gossip but the ordinarily sympathetic reader may sense here and there that the whole truth has not been permitted to emerge: dot-dot-dots come at crucial points, where one suspects an editorial decision has been made that certain names shall not be named, certain facts shall not be dragged out into the ...”

“... he tells us after describing the Hama insurrection in which as many as ten thousand people may have been killed, ‘but resorted to it only for raisons d’état or in what might laxly be called self-defence.’ Perhaps the argument itself is rather lax. Only psychopathic dictators ‘revel’ in killing; the others revel in power and, like Asad, are ...”

“... works from an economic-ideological one to a ‘practical’ one. He seems to suggest (though I may have misunderstood him) that this was more than just tactical: it represented an important intellectual modification of the Treasury View. But Hopkins’s later evidence to the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance was a full-blooded statement of what we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seats, and call it an airliner. Thus was the Boeing 747 born, and now David Lodge has written what may, in socio-historical terms, be the first post-Jumbo Jet novel. Just as Wordsworth and Ruskin in the last century predicted and fulminated against the social implications of the new railways’ capacity for moving hordes of people into somewhere like the Lake ...”