“... formal marriage into an illicit affair under pressure from foreign consumers and voters. Barclays may have sold its South African offspring at a bargain to Anglo-American, but the new company remains within the extended family. Do the different passports of its members really matter? When General Motors and IBM lend money to their South African management to ...”

“... Both she and Brookner give the impression of having their ‘secret’, and, however vulgar this may sound, it does unquestionably add to our sense of their work, and to our pleasure in it. Contact with a personality is one of the most obvious joys of novel-reading, but how very seldom is such a contact provocative and absorbing, or even interesting. In our ...”

“... to find out what is the smallest amount of money and the smallest number of men with which we may hope, some day, to win the war, or rather not to lose it, whereas the proper attitude is to see what is the greatest number of men we can put into the field in the shortest possible period of time, after thoroughly organising labour, eliminating all ...”

“... Our own Father Christmas – red and white like amanita, and borne aloft by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe used such homely drugs as belladonna, henbane and ...”

“... is possible. If Marrot’s biography has an old-fashioned flavour even for its period, this may be partly because Galsworthy himself was, long before his death, an uneasy survivor from a vanished age. Younger than Conrad or Yeats or Kipling, his mind and outlook seem fixed, as theirs do not, in an epoch that itself did not survive his prime – and this ...”

“... is an ambiguous compliment, but it does point to the mental energies that lost or trapped people may find for themselves. Nonsense, Peake said, ‘is not the opposite of good sense … It’s something quite apart – and isn’t the opposite of anything.’ Whenever poems and songs appear in the Gormenghast novels, which is often, they are invariably of the ...”

“... free markets, Popper didn’t spill much ink on the flaws in his model of the open society. He may have wanted it to be open to critical discussion, but he was surprisingly uninterested in the question of how to ensure that such discussion would be open to everyone and conducted on equal terms. Though he advocated a continual ‘fight against ...”

“... Last May I went to see Jean-Bertrand Aristide at his big white house in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince. I’d been there in March, when the former president had been back home only a week, and the place had the feel of a set under construction: workmen in overalls among the mango trees, the smell of new paint, a sputtering tap in the office bathroom ...”

“... he’s failed to say anything at all. The danger of delving into any spiritual practice may be that absolutely everything can start to seem as if it contains an important spiritual lesson. In this barrage of meaningful moments, though, there’s occasionally one that really could explain everything. In the next chapter, Parks returns to the question ...”

“... into its final stages, as the last few members are awakened and the brethren assemble. All of this may sound pretty silly, and it is. Readers who make it through the 700-odd pages of the trilogy may wonder why they persevered for so long with the fantasy. Ice evokes the everyday details of the post-Soviet world: the imported ...”

“... its used nuclear fuel. Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration from May 2003 to January 2007, told Rhodes that Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary for defense, had once explained to him why no one in the administration was interested in arms control. He said it was because arms control was the sort of thing you can’t get ...”

“... when it is highjacked by ideological thugs, then the wish-dream is certainly over, and that may be a reason we no longer need the heroes Bogart represented. The quietism is dismaying: To be sure, if Humphrey and the other First Amendment Committee members, and the studio heads, and the principal Wall Street investors in those studios had stood together ...”

“... forced up to a quarter of a million Londoners to take shelter in the Underground every night. In May 1918, 43 German bombers attacked London; but this was their last major raid. The shortage of raw materials in Germany had become so serious that new planes could not be built in sufficient numbers, and those that were built were shoddily constructed and often ...”

“... the years appeared to confirm the Soviet image: his Third Symphony (1930) was entitled First of May and a Soviet music journal reported him as saying in 1940 that ‘to write a symphony immortalising Lenin’s name’ had always been his ‘cherished dream’ (though he never did write one). His enormously successful Seventh (‘Leningrad’) Symphony ...”

“... and the French have needed time to come to terms with many inconvenient truths. This may account for the fact that la Françafrique is such a lively anachronism in their public debates. But if France’s decision to intervene in Mali had anything to do with la Françafrique, at least some of the following conditions would be met: Hollande would ...”