“... interest, and in an instant subordinates the lot to a single popular demand. It’s doubtful that David Cameron ever thought this far ahead, but in his passion for referendums (four were held during his premiership) he was testing parliamentary sovereignty to breaking point. Under these circumstances, political hegemony is ...”

“... for introducing the Viennese public to the music of Handel and J.S. Bach, and for a time held salons every Sunday (which Mozart attended) dedicated to the performance of Bach’s works, because he was fascinated by counterpoint. Liebhaber took a more ‘recreational’ view: they might get together to play a piano trio, or enjoy hearing a cassation ...”

“... instincts or libido shared with animals, are put first’. Always? Despised? The elders of Troy held Helen holy for obeying her libido. Respect for reason occupies a very tiny area in human history. In culture upon culture and empire after empire the prized capacities have been for reading portents in bird flight or shooting stars, discerning prophecies in ...”

“... cruelty of the elements. It comes with a recommendation by Graham Greene who says: ‘The story held me so completely ... I wish I had written this book.’ At first, this is a little surprising – for the adultery that triggers off the action is an ordinary American adultery, without sacrilegious or metaphysical overtones, and the central conflict is near ...”

“... masterly challenge to Viennese sonata form – on whose own creative challenges I had held forth. At his most informative, however, Henze is, of course, about himself, though when he discusses ‘the difficulties of writing political songs which could go beyond or circumvent the achievements of Eisler, Weill and Dessau’, one has to remind him ...”

“... a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from kinky tastes in sex to bad spelling and worse usage: ‘But the daisy chain ... was only just gathering speed. It was still a ...”

“... of inestimable value to the student of this European tragedy. The text repeatedly grabs the fruits held out so tantalisingly by the television series. No other book yet published on the conflict has been so meticulously documented, with almost every fact or date checked time and again. As such it will become invaluable as the standard reference work on the ...”

“... self appears in ‘Farewell Performance’, where he describes scattering the ashes of his friend David Kalstone: Now, in the furnace parched to ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel sifted through fingers, coarse yet greyly glimmering sublimate of palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive ‘Can’t we be just be friends?’ which your ...”

“... Arguing against the pejorative use of the word as a synonym for the absurdly unrealisable, he held that ‘there is one valid criterion for possible realisation, namely, when the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... The third anniversary of independence was celebrated at the new stadium; a beauty contest was held, with contestants described in their full range of skin colours, a sure sign that Jamaica’s ‘pigmentocracy’ was alive and well. The ‘not quite white’ Browns gathered on their verandas to drink rum punch, served by their Black servants (soon to be ...”

“... and the shooting. As we drove back to the Russian base that afternoon, Sergeant Major Glenn Snazle held the steering-wheel with one hand and a clearly visible pistol in the other. I don’t know how you conduct a hearts and minds campaign when you’re shooting people who come too close. 2 July. I’d been to most 8 a.m. intelligence briefings and repeatedly ...”

“... released in 1985 in exchange for some captured Israeli soldiers.The founding meeting of Hamas was held at Yassin’s home in Gaza in 1987, at the start of the first intifada. In attendance were professors, doctors, engineers and would-be revolutionaries who nursed memories of 1936 and the wounds of 1967. Rather than the elusive political settlement with ...”

“... might have been said in the Commission’s report was ever going to reconcile these two sincerely held, internally coherent, and mutually irreconcilable viewpoints. But we could have said something more than we did about the principles of the burden and standard of proof, if only to make clear our commitment to upholding the distinction between how judges are ...”

“... of a generalised identity-statement. It then emerges, however, that Sluga believes Frege to have held the two sides of Axiom V to coincide in sense, which would indeed make it, not merely true, but self-evident, as an axiom ought to be. If this were so, it would be one of the identity-statements which can be explained without appeal to the sense/reference ...”