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“... the skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to ...”

“... memorable one-liner, more redolent of Chicago under Prohibition than Downing Street, was uttered by Lloyd George. The Premier was reflecting upon one of his constant obsessions: the British press. His method of dealing with it, not wholly abandoned to this day, possessed a buccaneering simplicity. He ennobled the newspaper tycoons, distributing titles with a ...”

“... in ‘discourse’, something which itself presents a question; something which cannot thus be taken, as it has so long been taken, in much Christian theology and in the secular philosophy which followed, as the touchstone of any answer to some other question. Subjectivity is produced and becomes subjection. To leave it at that, though, simply to ...”

“... wrong, in that the Conservative Party had already largely disappeared – not for the last time. By the end of the 19th century the disintegration of the Whigs had led to the Conservative Party’s becoming for the first time in its history the natural choice of the wealthy; the Party already resembled the Republican Party in the United States and was near ...”

“... there is one of us. Computers are humanoid, too, in their versatility. Almost any computer can be instructed to do almost any one of the enormous variety of different things that computers in general can do. There has been nothing to equal it since the abolition of slavery. From the willing slave to the impassive robot is a small step for the ...”

“... The British and the Japanese may not be particularly alike, but the two races are exceedingly comparable. The British must actually believe this, for why else would they be displaying such a curious desperation to deny it? No doubt, they sense that to look at Japanese culture too closely would threaten a long-cherished complacency about their own ...”

“... the audience about form, in books about composers – for human interest is easily assimilated by the non-musician. It may be considered more useful than German (and hence American) scholarship, but it can hardly be denied that it does not make for good historical writing. The ...”

“... are all familiar enough with the habits of thought subsumed under ‘dialectical logic’ not to be surprised that Zinoviev should also be the source of a gross and unstanchable flow of satire. The Madhouse, which dates from 1980, is the latest of his novels to be published here in ...”

“... By the time he was 20 Henri Fournier wasn’t able to say whether it was the country itself that he missed – Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province – or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix ...”

“... Encounter. ‘To find anyone to answer your questions,’ I was told on New Year’s Day by a ski-mask (as opposed to a rank-and-file bandana), ‘you’d have to be in Reality.’ I was certainly in the wrong place, at Oventic rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I ...”

“... would drag to hell A spirit from on high. Orphans can cast the evil eye on us; their bad luck may be communicable. But what Riley was primarily saying was then considered perfectly acceptable: the poor and unfortunate were put here by divine dispensation so that luckier people could acquire merit ...”

“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... a well-timed series of wars) and discover much about the distribution of prize money, a system by which the proceeds from the sale of enemy vessels were divided among those who had played a role in their capture. The wars themselves take a back seat in a narrative driven by squabbles over precedence and the apportionment ...”

“... question is: ‘Are the Conservatives any longer a serious party?’ A serious party can be one of two things. It can, like the Greens, be concerned with only one issue or one group of issues. Its members are not hoping to form a government – they know they are never going to do that – but they believe the ...”

“... others. Lady Austin was not inclined to go quietly. Claiming to find a passing copper too dishy to be a real policeman, she told the inspector who was apprehending her: ‘I could love him and rub his Jimmy for him for hours.’ The inspector cautioned her. ‘There is nothing wrong in that,’ Lady Austin retorted. ‘You may think so, but it is what we call ...”