“... published) is often absent from the English edition, or else it is incorrect or incomplete. One may think that it does not make a huge difference to know that Bataille never published Madame Edwarda under his own name, contrary to what the Publisher’s Note in this edition tells us. And yet the fact that in 1956 Bataille published a solemn celebratory ...”

“... the miners’ union leaders throughout their stay in Bucharest. Whatever else the Ceausescu regime may have been responsible for, it did not resort to open violence on this scale. Using the miners to suppress the opposition was a tactic original to the new regime and had fascistic elements. The miners’ racism became evident when they made a particular target ...”

“... the nickname itself derives from schooldays at Winchester rather than from Labour politics, and it may well be true that Crossman bore the title all his life. Still, I’m quite clear that he earned it afresh, as it were. There’s an old Claud Cockburn doggerel that goes (from my memory): Here lies the body of Dick Double-Crossman, Classical don with ...”

“... is metaphorically abstemious; his lines are poised, denotative, built on careful nouns. What may seem to be metaphors – Their words are soot. They tattoo the cosmos – turn out to figure accepted connections between things. Metaphor is hardly necessary, because the busy parts of Tikigaq’s world already have a far closer relation to each other than ...”

“... for middle-class voters and collective provision for the poor. The lesson of the United States may be that flourishing markets and broad prosperity for large sectors of society are compatible with quite high levels of urban ruin, poverty and racial conflict in carefully demarcated ‘combat zones’. Markets, it seems, are not quite the fragile ecosystems ...”

“... the institutions of a state from the ground up in the Occupied Territories. Success in this may generate the momentum that will eventually carry them forward to full statehood after the five-year interim period. Arab reactions to the accord have been rather mixed. Arafat got a polite but cool reception from the 19 foreign ministers of the Arab League ...”

“... by the society that produced it, in terms of the roles, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that it may have played, of the conflicts implicit in individual works and of what they did and did not portray. The history of art cannot be the history of art alone. Well, no, but it is difficult to see here, or in the essays themselves, anything essential to this ...”

“... them work (and tenured jobs) for life. Other debts are so large that we forget them, though we may owe our sanity and working lives to childcare centres, equal-opportunity provisions, the means of controlling fertility – and underlying all that, the massive shift of consciousness to which Beauvoir contributed inestimably. Now, at least, those who assault ...”

“... true that he has found himself in this position by a mixture of chance and opportunism. The same may apply to much of the contemporary Russian political establishment, but he, more than most, has exploited a difficult situation with great skill and ruthlessness. It is now clear that the challenge he mounted to the Presidency, and the counter-challenge ...”

“... had been run through, is more or less true. Some five hundred scientists gathered in Vienna in May 1991 to say that the genetic abnormalities which had occurred since Chernobyl were not statistically higher than they would have been, had there been no accident, and that the incidence of cancers was relatively low. They were simply not believed, nor are ...”

“... is style, there is inevitably density, Dichtung. There’s no end to the ways in which reality may be thought about and, therefore, written about, written about and, therefore, thought about. The repertoire of possible styles is infinite. Density can be achieved in a simple sentence as well as in an elaborate one. So a fairer comparison for the sentences ...”

“... Tangier in 1954. ‘You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you. Buddhism frequently amounts to a form of psychic junk ... I may add that I have seen nothing from those California Vedantists but a lot of horse shit, and I denounce them without cavil, as a pack of pathetic ...”

“... as in so many of his barrack-room card games, he ended up with misère: Querétaro fell on 15 May 1867. Maximilian tried ineffectually to escape and then surrendered. He and his two leading Mexican generals were court-martialled and sentenced to be shot. European and American intercession failed to win a reprieve: feelings in the liberal camp ran too ...”

“... the volume was not so interpreted by contemporaries on its appearance in September 1798, when it may actually have disappointed radical expectations. The first name on the title page was that of the out-of-town publisher Joseph Cottle of Bristol. It’s an odd fact that Cottle authors – the youthful Southey and Coleridge alone, together, or in conjunction ...”

“... 1945? Culturally, economically and socially the answers might be yes – ‘structuralists’ may even speculate about a slow process of liberalisation analogous to Spain’s, albeit without the push of turismo. But politically that outcome was always impossible because Nazi Germany was Hitler’s Germany, and Hitler wanted war even more than he wanted ...”