“... becomes a ‘wasm’, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means nothing, although there are probably one or two European politicians who think it has something to do with being rude to foreigners at conferences. True, in some other countries, but not in Germany or Japan, or not for long, New Right ideology has been ...”

“... to such ideas as God and Satan, good and evil, faith and reason, freedom and fate. By means of such systems, contradictory absolutes can be fitted to the otherwise intractable realities of everyday life. Accordingly, distance from the ‘centre’ means estrangement from what is conventionally understood as ...”

“... remarks that he has seldom been remiss in spotting opportunities and in putting together the means to seize them. In his hands everything, everyone could be an instrument. He was the most versatile player in Australia and among the readiest in Britain and the United States: but what would he play? He was on a random walk, and despite the ever greater ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...”

“... the American method of teaching history, and not least their own history, coupled with the by no means uncommon requirement that students purchase copies of designated books, that has generated such an enormous demand for the general text, a demand which American historians and publishers alike have long been eager to satisfy. This is a perfectly respectable ...”

“... it, because not understanding it in scientific terms is not to understand it at all, but David Bodanis, the author of E=mc2, is not one of them. As someone to whom science has always been a black hole, I see Bodanis and those who bother to try to explain to the likes of me what they understand mathematically as therapists of a sort. Not to understand ...”

“... into infighting and persistent one-upmanship. His love life was an extension of politics by other means.What he longed for was the perfect prince. He spent his life looking for a true ‘gentleman’ politician to whom he could offer his services. He thought he had found one in Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor, his first big political ...”

“... and the so-called Jews of today. If Zionism preaches a glorious history going back to the days of David and Solomon, then that history must be a fiction cooked up centuries later for ideological purposes. If Zionism maintains that Jews longed to go home, then they must have been content to stay put. And if Zionists base their claim to the land of Israel on ...”

“... intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. In short, for Americans who watch ...”

“... market will not permit some marginal adjustment on which he had staked ‘credibility’. This means, he advises his team, that they are all ‘Eisenhower Republicans’ now. Have a care, Mr President. Eisenhower was quite an activist chief executive. He built the interstate highway system and warned about the growth of the military-industrial complex. It ...”

“... has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an enviable task. Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... attention came when Goldsmith himself stood in the 1997 general election in Putney against David Mellor, the cabinet minister who had been caught having an affair with an actress. Her fuck-and-tell story ran in the tabloids and included the fictional detail that (to quote the front page of the Sun) ‘Mellor Made Love in Chelsea Strip’. In a ...”

“... was ‘doing exactly what I like’. I said, teasingly: ‘Well, in your case that probably means rereading Proust.’ Her eyes widened in alarm: ‘How did you guess?’ On another occasion we discussed Simenon. I had mainly read the Maigret stories; she had mainly read the romans durs, which she greatly admired. I asked her to recommend one. She ...”

“... page. It reads as if made from a dead language.’It was McGuinness who, in collaboration with David Pears, produced the second English translation, in 1961. But the correspondence with Ogden, in which Wittgenstein commented on the first draft of the first translation, had not yet come to light (it was published only in 1973), so there was little ...”