“... It is likely that not willing is not a practicable state of mind; not to want to do something may be in the long run a mental content impossible to subsist on. Between not willing a certain thing and not willing at all – in other words, yielding to another person’s will – there may lie too small a space for the ...”

“... it is more genuine than invented; as Devine puts it, ‘Scotland was born fighting.’ But it may be that it belongs more to the Lowlanders, who after all fought the Wars of Independence, than to the Highlanders. Wherever the Gaelic clans and their claymores were in 1314, it wasn’t at Bannockburn. Emigration and the formation of a diaspora are the ...”

“... nursing her mother, who suffered a stroke a year after her father died. The habit of reclusiveness may even have begun, Gordon hypothesises, with a wish to imitate the young Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whatever its origin, Dickinson’s eccentric conduct made her – or the idea of her – conspicuous. As Richard Chase put it in his 1951 study, ‘She receded ...”

“... the way to interpret a foreign culture sympathetically. But however much Mead and Benedict may have desired to ‘make the world safe for differences’, their ideas also contributed to the consolidation of US hegemony in the postwar years. To see how​ this happened, it’s helpful to return to some of the assumptions behind the Culture and ...”

“... Moneyball has something of the flavour of New Labour. The obsession with targets and statistics may start out as a way of effecting meaningful changes, as a means to an end, but it’s hard to prevent the targets themselves from becoming the point. Beane’s approach to managing the Oakland A’s involved bypassing the traditional experts (the club’s ...”

“... declares at the start that he knew and liked Trevor-Roper and that in writing this Life ‘I may have been influenced by feelings of loyalty, affection and gratitude.’ He leans towards the ‘fundamentally nice’ view. But the niceness was not apparent to many people, who had to judge Trevor-Roper by what and how he wrote. The prose style he adopted ...”

“... the wrong way. This is the right way’) created a British idea of motherliness; while the Hymns may have been even more influential. They were extraordinarily popular, repeatedly reprinted in Britain over the next 120 years. Their message is sunny and upbeat, a kind of nursery Priestleianism, resolutely looking on ‘the bright side of every thing’, and ...”

“... The killing of the girl is strictly revolting, and no less so for being kept out of view; Haneke may refrain from graphic violence, may switch to Benny’s oblique video of the scene, but the girl’s screams alone are upsetting in the extreme. Haneke has little apparent sense of humour, but he has an appalled sense of ...”

“... both as a critic and as a biographer. As a biographer, he travels to some of the houses that may have served as models for James, and he re-creates as well as anyone could the scenes of authorial composition. Though this novel changed everything in James’s career – though it is the portal through which the writer we think of as ‘Jamesian’, or as ...”

“... only compounds the offence. A guest editorial by Schlink in Der Spiegel in September 2007 may give a clue as to what is at stake in Homecoming. The German defence minister Franz Josef Jung had stated that shooting down hijacked planes might be allowed under constitutional law: ‘in situations of general danger or when Germany’s fundamental liberal ...”

“... ideas he hears people talk about. When Rumsfeld formulated the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war in May 2002, Woodward reports that the secretary of defense heard from a friend that the notion of pre-emptive war ‘went back centuries’ and that Sir Thomas More had written about pre-emption in Utopia. This is true: More did write about the ...”

“... the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff for nearly a decade. What he felt about Philby’s betrayal may only be imagined because he kept his thoughts to himself and rarely – perhaps never – mentioned Philby’s name again. Morley​ tells the Philby story in both his books, and he tells it well. But he makes no serious attempt to weigh its full impact on ...”

“... to a better way of life? What right have you to condemn them to a primitive life? … The Penans may tell you that … is what they like. That is because they are not able to live a better life like the other tribes in Sarawak … Stop being arrogant and thinking that it is the white man’s burden to decide the fate of the peoples in this world. As the ...”

“... Most mass-produced raw white flour tastes of almost nothing, although if you try very hard, you may notice a faint aroma of wallpaper paste. It’s also lacking in nutrients, even if, unlike coeliacs, you are able to tolerate gluten. As the journalist Wendell Steavenson writes, white flour is ‘a pure starch so nutritionally void’ that by law vitamins ...”

“... for bestiality in 2001, in a review of Midas Dekkers’s Dearest Pet:The taboo on sex with animals may have originated as part of a broader rejection of non-reproductive sex. But the vehemence with which this prohibition continues to be held, its persistence while other non-reproductive sexual acts have become acceptable, suggests that there is another ...”