“... difficult to enforce by mere codes of dress and manners’. The idea of reputation, a means of social positioning that went beyond (and indeed could counter) the immovabilities of birth, was ‘at the heart of the Enlightenment’s attempts to understand what, in the late 18th century, it meant to be modern’. Following an altercation at his ...”

“... by the amount it helps to raise for these causes. But this is no justification at all. No means of raising revenue can be justified simply by pointing to the amount of money raised for some or other cause unless that cause is unequivocally good. And if the cause is unequivocally good, then any means of raising the ...”

“... mounted, however, some soldiers worried about Soviet retaliation: ‘The freedom of the people means death for us. Now our luck is not worth much anymore.’ Other Tatars fought with the partisans, even though most commanders made no secret of their anti-Muslim feelings. Towards the end of the occupation, Tatar relations with the Germans cooled. SS and ...”

“... to use Kant’s term, of ‘boundlessness’ (Grenzenlosigkeit). I think this is what Serra means when he speaks of the ‘openness’ of a work. It is a classic post-minimalist paradox. Your response, your action creates the conditions for the experience of sublimity. Yet faced with the grandeur of the Sublime you can no longer think, let alone ...”

“... all the way to the extreme conclusion – that the mind contributes everything – this is by no means a necessary consummation. Kant himself did not go so far. But Berkeley based his idealism on the consideration of sense-perception, and if he had stopped half-way, with Galileo or Locke, and left some of the properties of things outside the mind, he would ...”

“... and Gloucester were called to see the body and viewed it ‘superficially’, but this probably means that they couldn’t examine how the king died, not that they couldn’t see his face. It is hard to imagine a quicker way of adding to the rumours that the king was alive than for large numbers of people to see a corpse with the face covered up. That ...”

“... From the outset, ambiguity enfolds The Plum in the Golden Vase, David Tod Roy’s translation of the first volume of the monumental 16th-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei. The title, as he explains in his Introduction, is a ‘multiple pun’ composed of one ideogram each from the names of the three principal female protagonists ...”

“... regulators who looked incompetent. Branson’s strategy, his way of portraying himself as a plucky David in a world of corporate Goliaths doesn’t always work. Sometimes the charade is too transparent. Following the failed prosecution, BA turned its attention to alliances and takeovers to shore up its position, first with American Airlines, then Iberia, then ...”

“... throughout, has not been tempered by time. Written in the form of a journal, The Longest War means us to feel that we are listening to a major ‘voice’, and it is perfectly true that there was little room for doubt that a new book by Timerman would attract the attention of a serious audience in the Western world. He is the former Argentinian newspaper ...”

“... linguistic content, and then use that decoded content as the basis for inferring what the speaker means to communicate. It is the second process, inference, which completes the act of communication. The same must be true of the ‘language’ of gesture. If we want to understand what someone means by standing with his arm ...”

“... the glass. In Tennessee, he noted that the people had elected to Congress ‘an individual called David Crockett, who had received no education, could read only with difficulty, had no property, no fixed dwelling, but spent … his whole life in the woods’. Yet Alexis de Tocqueville also found America ‘a most interesting and instructive country to ...”

“... and its impact on Europe, largely, though not entirely, through the work of archaeologists. David Wilson, Director of the British Museum, is among the most distinguished of these, and the exhibition which he and his pupils have mounted there (until 20 July) quite properly commemorates their achievement and that of their Scandinavian colleagues. This, in ...”

“... per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). That pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as sixteen great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head.There are two different ways to describe a family tree. You can start with ...”

“... sport and considered the gap between the IOC’s claims and the reality of its actions. David Miller’s Igniting the Games is not that book. As its subtitle suggests, it is primarily a celebration of Bach’s heroic attempts to surmount the crisis. Miller has past form for leaving out uncomfortable facts. His official history of the IOC describes ...”

“... sacrificed the Lusitania to draw the United States into the war. Both Diana Preston and David Ramsay deal briskly and effectively with this. Churchill and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, were preoccupied with the escalating political crisis over Gallipoli. The absence of British naval escorts for the Lusitania in the war zone reflected the ...”