“... same ‘tough’ new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that ...”

“... thereby inviting a German attack. Girvin suggests that the bombing of Dublin by the Luftwaffe in May 1941, which saw 34 civilian deaths in the North Strand area and the destruction of hundreds of houses, was a warning of the price to be paid for giving up neutrality. Second, de Valera feared a pre-emptive British invasion would be justified by Britain’s ...”

“... French scholars featured a banquet of Perfects’ terrine, Montségur cheese and Cathar cake. This may seem as innocuous as the 20th-century British retro-chic Raphael Samuel describes in Theatres of Memory. But search the Internet on Cathars (I looked at only a handful of the 5790 web-pages), and material that would clearly interest historians of modern and ...”

“... stables of the intellect’ – Toulmin’s admiring version of Wittgenstein’s vocation – may be a useful act of philosophical hygiene, but, if you’re consistent in such things, it lacks consequentiality. If, on the other hand, you really believe that philosophical and social scientific Dreams of Rationality and Certainty are disrupting basically ...”

“... the warlords in Kabul are all more or less on the same side, from one ethnic group, the Tajiks. It may not be the worst outcome, but it isn’t good. Basir had inherited a Taliban major-domo. The man had simply stayed on and was comfortably serving his new master. His entrance was one of two interruptions as we sat chatting. The other was Delagha, bringing a ...”

“... Europe needs that form of interconnectedness which rests on genuine connections. Hobbes may have been wrong about a lot of things, including the incompatibility of sovereignty and federal government, but he was right when he said that the union of a multitude requires nothing more than that they should be represented as though one. What Swedes and ...”

“... Martha for preventing him from gaining early recognition in the world of medical science. ‘I may here recount, looking back, that it was my fiancée’s fault if I did not become famous in those early years,’ he wrote in his self-portrait. His experiments with cocaine in the 1880s were taken up and elaborated by others. What the late Princess Margaret ...”

“... tomorrow.’ The underlying profundity of this remark is a reminder that, while Shaw’s ideas may have begun as jokes, they didn’t end there. In his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Shaw advocated wages for housework, a slogan which (along with Black Power) was to express a political truth in utopian form more than forty years later. The ...”

“... above all because it was not reducible to a set of personal or partisan opinions. Scientists may disagree with one another but, when they do, the appeal on both sides of the argument is to hard facts, and what a relief that was for a man as irascible as Flaubert, who had a serious problem with opinions which lacked the backing of the hard facts that ...”

“... it, but the sting goes in nevertheless, swift and sharp and surprisingly long-lasting. By mid-May everything was coming up in strips of vivid colour: extremely beautiful, and touching in its intimate scale, like a child’s picture of a farm. Union Square market had reopened and the work shifted gear: faster, harder, suddenly exhilarating. We harvested a ...”

“... that stay. Out of this arrogance, incompetence and sheer stupidity came a policy failure that may yet beggar the debacle of ...”

“... regarded embassies and their staff as little more than family retainers, an attitude which, again, may not seem so surprising when you remember that Mrs Thatcher greeted the news of the arrival of Mark’s first child with ‘We are a grandmother.’ Everything about Mark is so rebarbative that it seems only natural that he would count Jonathan Aitken and ...”

“... remain; you can always have recourse to the landscape, and it will never leave you, though you may leave it. Leaving home and returning are the main narratives. Rivers and roads, the long-distance elements of the landscape, are the geographical refrains of the genre. Williams’s lost highway is a metaphysical condition more than a place, a sort of Dantean ...”

“... the unique and the general; the way it recognises that while being illuminated with immensity may feel like a miracle to a soldier who has lived through a night – or night after night – in the trenches, it is to most people at most times just the start of another day. The features that render ‘Mattina’ so amenable to mass reproduction make it a ...”

“... well as he did, but understanding how to conduct human relationships was not his strong suit. Lou may have kissed Nietzsche when they were walking together, which was enough to cause him to propose a second time; the first proposal – made the day they met, when he greeted her with ‘What stars have sent us orbiting towards each other?’ – had been, he ...”