“... Rights and the Rule of Law, gave the Helsinki Commission a bleak assessment of his country in May last year. Its judicial system, he said, was worse than it had been in Soviet times while the president’s party, Nur-Otan (Light of the Fatherland), was little different from the Soviet Communist Party in the way it functioned. Two months after giving this ...”

“... current world philosophy’. Marx’s father was in the last stages of tuberculosis, and died in May 1838, after which his modest estate was divided up between his widow and surviving children according to the Napoleonic law that held sway in the Rhineland, leaving Marx with next to nothing. Back in Berlin, he fell in with the Young Hegelians, a loose group ...”

“... Put your trust in sensibility, in instinct. As a response to Matisse’s picture, these sentences may seem bizarre. To most viewers Woman with a Hat is the very epitome of the accidental and instinctive in painting. It is passionate and expressive. The hat sums up its mode. And yet Denis’s verdict, in my experience, will never entirely go away. The more one ...”

“... there been some security leak which had brought her the knowledge by ordinary means? However it may be, it does seem that MI5 was involved in building the case against her, and it is clear that she was seen as a security risk – damaging to morale, at least. However she got her peculiar knowledge, it was best to lock her up and teach her a lesson. Malcolm ...”

“... Hardy had purchased the plot of land on which Max Gate stood, and her caption speculates that he may have ‘felt understandably proud that royalty now came to him’, which is just what we want her to suggest. Remove the aspirant mother and half of English literature would disappear. Hardy’s father was a builder and his mother, Jemima, had been a servant ...”

“... the more senior General Ali Kuli Khan (who was at college with me in Lahore). Sharif’s reasoning may have been that Musharraf, from a middle-class, refugee background like himself, would be easier to manipulate than Ali Kuli, who came from a landed Pathan family in the NWFP. Whatever the reasoning, it turned out to be a mistake. On Bill Clinton’s ...”

“... that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were scarred. If we ...”

“... Seymour is willing to confess that Graves could be completely impossible. Facts matter, but they may reveal less about human beings than fictions. And if you want to get to know Graves, Goodbye to All That, despite its many inaccuracies, knocks the spots off any biography as a guide to his psychology as well as that of his class and of the generation who ...”

“... to be one. According to this logic, as long as Israel refrains from formalising annexation, it may indefinitely withhold civil rights from millions of Palestinians while offering every form of support to Israelis in the occupied territory: infrastructure for Israeli cities, towns and industrial zones in the West Bank; nature reserves; municipal ...”

“... was quickly recognised as the worst in the history of presidential debates. In a close contest, it may have done him terminal damage.Instead of blaming Kissinger for having been too clever by half in the debate prep, Ford blamed himself for being too slow-witted to do the briefing justice. Schwartz describes what happened next:Meeting with Kissinger a few days ...”

“... an artist born into an age devoid of artistic standards’.Given that ‘very tragic’ plight, it may not be surprising that Waugh began his study with the observation that ‘there is singularly little fun to be got out of Rossetti.’ But Decline and Fall manages to get a great deal of fun out of much the same baffled predicament of an age without ...”

“... a microscopic attentiveness that could evade emotion, yet eye and heart will go a-roving and there may be turn-ons too – piercings, tensions, spasms. All this comes through quietly. One reason that Schuyler didn’t always like poetry to be read aloud was because it made it ‘go by too quickly’, the voice distracting from what he referred to as the ...”

“... unscrupulous who go into politics, hence the present futile government.’ When the awakening of 4 May 1919 came, with the student protests that marked the birth of modern politics in China, his response was enthusiastic. ‘All China is on strike! It is most impressive,’ he reported, ‘all business is at a standstill and the students, who are running the ...”

“... It speaks for them because they shared a place in time.’She begins her present book, which ‘may or may not be a biography of Kathy Acker’, by evoking the circles that gathered around her subject’s ashes in the weeks after her death from metastatic breast cancer in an alternative medicine clinic in Tijuana in ...”

“... they get ‘friended’, but many of them will never meet. Elsewhere on the net the connections may lead to a cold presence, a person who is legitimate but non-existent. Ronnie’s social interaction online could be involved and energetic and characterful, but it seemed that everyone he met had a self to hide and nothing to show for themselves beyond their ...”