“... not impossible, the Wirral by-election does suggest that Labour will win some sort of majority in May. The size of the victory, however, matters less than the nature of the Party – New Labour – which seems likely to win it. And we must accept the fact that it really is new. When Tony Blair assures us of that he is not, as the Tories insist, merely ...”

“... lack of party structures and discipline in Pakistan. The military intelligence service, the ISI, may well have played a covert role in undermining the agreement between Bhutto’s Party and the ANP. But, if it did, its role was only a subsidiary one. In the Pashtun areas at least, whatever the case elsewhere, the election result was genuinely democratic, and ...”

“... Melville – to be present on such occasions; the remotest event, the smallest recorded detail, may have meaning: its inclusion is therefore self-justifying; in any case, Parker, like all great scholars, loves what he knows. He knows the topography of Boston and New York, the evolving social history of a neighbourhood or particular street; he knows the ...”

“... victims, that Aslan was found dead in a car, killed by a member of his own entourage – which may or may not be true – in September 1998, and that the other pictures were removed from Aslan’s house during a police investigation. The parody of militant Islam compromised the Aslan dossier. The rest of the evidence had ...”

“... some reviewer, next month, ‘gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY, (in which I remember the weather was very hot)’, the heated critic should not be exasperated at being treated with ‘good temper’. Like the fly that buzzed around Uncle Toby’s nose all through dinner, he would be allowed to buzz off ...”

“... in 1972, assuring her an attentive hearing from Japan’s huge neighbour. Deeper calculations may have been behind her appointment, however. She was prepared to describe the Foreign Ministry, long believed to be without fault, as ‘a hotbed of corruption’. Japan’s ultra-secretive spook outfit, the Cabinet Research Office, is funded by off-budget ...”

“... away. ‘We can’t abandon the farm,’ they say, ‘it’s been our life. The farmworkers may be terrified but they’ve still got their jobs. We’ve never been so close with them as we are now. We might still come through this.’ Between Dave, the globalised businessman, watching flower prices in Honolulu and tobacco prices in Beijing, and Comrade ...”

“... birthmark that afflicts Smythe in the novel is transferred, in the film, to Parkis’s boy. This may have seemed an economical way to deal with two of Sarah’s ‘miracles’ at once, but it causes some irksome problems. It’s no big deal for Sarah to kiss the child: as the priest remarks in The Power and the Glory, ‘it was too easy to die for what was ...”

“... over in academia Prince is still the party tape of choice. Publishing ‘like it’s 1999’ may be variously interpreted, but whatever the resulting book is called, the assumption is the same: the end of the millennium is inextricably linked with apocalypse, the end of the world, and the messianic fanatics who seek to bring it about. And so although ...”

“... theorems, equations and ‘synoptic tables of lyric values’. At a performance in London in May 1914 of Zang Toumb Toumb, he also had a telephone installed on stage, into which he barked orders to his only English disciple, the painter C.R.W. Nevinson, who would then bang two enormous drums in an adjoining room. Zang Toumb Toumb, translated into English ...”

“... lives would have been sacrificed for little or no gain. Therefore, the precautionary principle may require the needless sacrifice of innocent life whether it is applied to war in Iraq or to the emission of carbon dioxide. In both cases, the argument must be the same: it’s worth taking a chance on the needless sacrifice of innocent lives only because the ...”

“... anti-semites, and has tended to be shunned as a result. But avoiding certain questions because one may not like the answers is a kind of intellectual dishonesty, no matter how virtuous the motives (my comment, not Slezkine’s: his work, for all its potential for controversy, is free of polemics). It is, in fact, impossible to understand the victimisation of ...”

“... of the Middle Ages, whose principles they believed Charles to have broken. The Earl of Bedford may, as Adamson observes, have shown an acquaintance with the political practices of ancient and modern republics in his notebooks. So did a great many other people in theirs. But there is nothing to connect that intellectual cosmopolitanism to the schemes of the ...”

“... effectiveness of any medical intervention. That’s to say, medical therapies did little good, and may well have done much harm. And then it all changed. Medicine now ‘works’: Wootton sees no reason to qualify the claim or to mobilise a mass of evidence in its favour. So progress must be acknowledged, but failure must be specially explained. Wootton’s ...”

“... is the motif of Stravinsky’s career. Walsh speculates in his first volume that the notion may have come from the views of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose suggestion that ‘the tedium of living and willing stops at the door of every studio’ is wonderfully apt for Stravinsky, the most detached if domestically tyrannical of ...”