“... for ethical reasons is both a political action and a retreat from politics. Ethical consumption may indeed be the best we can do, and it gives the ethical consumer a nice warm glow, but it is also another form of self-expression through consumption, and it is consumption, at root, which is the problem. At a global level, you could say that choosing not to ...”

“... is down to the fact that he has been off training with an injury for a couple of months. This may be so; but the truth is he if anything looks a bit thinner than he has done playing for Real Madrid in the last couple of seasons. I think he’s a bit porky for no other reason than that he likes his pies. I also think there is something noble about a ...”

“... the reconstruction of a narrative that (in terms of cause, event and effect) is as truthful as may be. He has made full use of Froissart and many other chroniclers, but his principal sources are the records that survive: of taxation, of payments made, of musters, of appointments to command and of instructions to negotiators, together with ...”

“... sensation, when I consider that a Work which was so lately Lodged, in all privacy, in my Bureau, may now be seen by every Butcher & Baker, Cobler & Tinker, throughout the 3 kingdoms, for the small tribute of 3 pence.’ Her own book could be a thing of vulgar pleasure. Evelina was certainly written by a snob, but one sharp-sighted enough to make her sense of ...”

“... when we have invented plastic, and the doll’s head with her tufts of hair and rolling eyes may well persist after our own have cleaned back down to bone. It was Martin who gave me the gannet’s skull. We had moved to the island of Scarp, and though he had found the bird bones on Ceann Iar, he chose this moment to produce them, with mock-ceremony, from ...”

“... fighters were encouraged to carry out such practices by their ritual specialists, while others may have simply improvised behaviour on the basis of a received belief that this would make them powerful. They often referred to the human heart using mechanical images, calling it ‘the engine’ or ‘the main machine’. During the third battle of Monrovia ...”

“... that make Billy Connolly’s childhood seem like a chapter from The Swiss Family Robinson. They may be right to feel hunted by the press, but feeling hunted by the press is an aspect of self-hunting too: their famousness is an occasion for grief, and their grief is a constituent part of their fame. The newspapers love abuse stories and they love the mixture ...”

“... have decreased a little in size. There was neither excitement nor disappointment in his manner. It may be that he has the same air of studied neutrality in his everyday life, when eating a delicious meal or going over the top on a rollercoaster. Or, more likely, it is for work purposes alone, in order to prevent over-excitement or crashing disappointment in ...”

“... Screams in Favour of Sade (1952), to the slogan that spread around the walls of Paris during May 1968: ‘Sadists of all nations, popularise the struggle of the divine Marquis!’ But this has not been the only note sounded. As news of Nazi atrocities began to filter through to them in their Californian exile, Adorno and Horkheimer dedicated the second ...”

“... science or birth control. When people are ‘victims’ of their own government, military means may be used (if the risk of retaliation is low). Gbagbo’s violent rejection of majority rule, like Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya, is a case in point. In Zimbabwe, however, no intervention. The international community intervenes à la carte. Other reasons are more ...”

“... operation. The great days of office buildings dictating where and how individuals work within them may have gone. There are new architects and designers who collaborate with the workers themselves to produce interiors that suit their needs and desires. ‘Co-design’ – allowing the users of a space to have an equal say in how it is organised – is a first ...”

“... Eventually borderline personality disorder is settled on: ‘Such patients,’ the manual says, ‘may seem charming, composed and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next.’ At last an account Didion is willing to accept: ‘I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair’: I had seen her ...”

“... Kennan’s modest agenda for thawing relations with Belgrade. Kennan left government for good in May 1963. Yugoslavia’s estrangement from Moscow, unrest in Poland, rebellion in Hungary, Khrushchev’s destalinisation campaign and the Sino-Soviet split made it apparent that the notion of a monolithic communist threat was no longer justified by the ...”

“... orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a ...”

“... was much too expensive to fall into the hands of the discontented poor – and of a novel that may be the first ‘thriller’, and a genuinely thrilling one, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. In the atmosphere of the great show trials of 1794, Thelwall’s among them, Godwin worried that Caleb Williams, with its unflattering picture of ‘things as they ...”