“... easy to know ‘where power lay and what the prospects were’. The fatuity of the assertion is self-evident. Here we have two serious analysts, working with considerably more information than was available under previous Soviet leaders, and they cannot really tell us if Mikhail Gorbachev will make much difference to anything. They are both agreed that ...”

“... a subtle ear. If Housman had been able to effect a junction between his poetic and his critical self, if like the mutinous Ned in one of his finest poems – how characteristic that when he submitted Last Poems to J.W. Mackail for criticism, ‘Hell Gate’ should have been the one he had most doubts about! – he had found the courage to shoot the ...”

“... First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be satisfied within the terms of the old, 19th-century polity. In contrast to those of Germany, Italy and France, however, it was overcome; and it was overcome by buying the working class off. The forms of the ...”

“... Trinidad, he records, that helped him become a writer, by sending him to England: but it was self-governing Trinidad that sent him on ‘a colonial tour in 1960 – and by this accident I became a traveller.’ Much of his fiction and travel writing reflects a strong interest in the question of where he – and people in like case, colonials or ...”

“... in the first place. And when he looks at government, dark glasses emphasise inefficiency and the self-seeking of interest groups. If the spectacles were swopped over, we might see an idealistic public sector doing its best – in the face of private-sector failures and special pleading – to improve welfare, the allocation of resources and the dynamism of ...”

“... the General, a sort of 80th birthday present to himself, curiously crowns this long-term labour of self-fictionalisation. Ostensibly, it tells the story of his five visits to Panama between 1976 and 1981, at the invitation of General Omar Torrijos Herrera, ruler of the country since 1968. Torrijos must have thought very highly of Greene to invest in all those ...”

“... are strengthened and ‘weak’ currencies weakened: governments which try to stem these self-reinforcing tides are overwhelmed. The net effect, Michael Stewart suggests, is that the whole system is biased towards deflation. The national governments which decide whether to deflate or reflate do not – indeed, under our present political ...”

“... some of Professor Mitchison’s material on shortage of food in Scotland in the 1690s. It is not a self-evidently absurd hypothesis that the wave of witchcraft prosecutions in Europe marks the Continent’s narrow avoidance of a major Malthusian crisis, and it seems to be true that witchcraft prosecutions accompany a rapid rise in population, and that cases ...”

“... there should be rising coal production: there is no more reason why a country should aim to be self-sufficient in the production of energy than in the production of steel, cars or tiddlywinks. A country should concentrate on producing the goods and services in which it has a comparative advantage, selling these abroad in exchange for the products in which ...”

“... clearly she could. When he writes ‘this far’, I am dead sure that ‘this’ is not an adverb. Self-contradictorily, however, he seems to believe that a word cannot be an adverb unless it ends in -ly. There seems no other reason for him to write ‘overly’, a North American usage I always find overly ripe. Stylistically, he is at his most infuriating ...”

“... towel to the floor in front of her. She was meant to see that he was saying something to her about self-exposure. The only cure for true love is getting to know each other better. Happiness and reality are irreconcilable. And yet – this is the trouble – they are a mated pair. ‘Woman,’ said James, reverting to spoken language, ‘lie down and die ...”

“... contradictory. One ‘contradiction’ is that deterrence requires that ‘we seek to avoid our self-extinction by threatening to perform the act.’ But ‘we cannot both threaten ourselves with something and hope to avoid that same thing by making the threat – both intend to do something and intend not to do it.’ The view that Schell is here attacking ...”

“... and some norm.’ Granted that a preference, on the one hand, for personalities capable of self-control and remorse, without marked propensities for delusion or hallucination, whose sexual inclinations are directed towards persons of the opposite sex and the same species, and a preference for blood-sugar levels compatible with consciousness, on the ...”

“... of the Greek romance; it would be difficult to establish, in a style which always verges on self-parody. Allegory looks more promising. The idea is not new. The Byzantines justified their reading of the amorous Heliodorus by making him a bishop and his book a history of the soul’s search for god. The Elizabethans took the same view of the louche and ...”

“... reaction and beyond the transition, you have a right to feel superior.’ He was always free of self-doubt. Seeing photographs of him in his smock (he was against trousers but sometimes wore loose drawers underneath the smock), stalwart and bearded, it is easy to think of him as a Medieval master-craftsman. The Catholic convert accepted the authority of ...”