“... page, is striking. Most of the missteps are concentrated in the first two hundred pages, which may not be much of a consolation to readers hoping to reach cruising speed sooner rather than later. Technical flaws interfere with the mechanisms that allow a book to realise its ambitions. The title of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is itself such a ...”

“... where Taylor and Dworkin join hands, a philosophy of belief assures readers that whatever they may think, religion still provides the spiritual springboard of their lives, while a philosophy of disbelief informs them of the vital need for religion, even if they can dispense with god.4 Last but not least is the contention – Rawls and Habermas ...”

“... slowness of the rescue operation. ‘It now looks like the South will be relying on volunteers. It may turn out to be one of the greatest volunteer operations this country has ever seen. President Bush said it made him proud to witness the response of everyday working Americans.’ A second story said the ordeal had opened ‘an old wound’ about race in ...”

“... to compare his project with that of the great Democratic coalition mustered to the north. Lula may come closer, but the contrasts between the New Deal and his intendancy are still plain. Roosevelt’s social reforms were introduced under pressure from below, in a wave of explosive strikes and rolling unionisation. Organised labour became a formidable force ...”

“... centralisation of economic affairs and government in an increasingly narrow group that may for all practical purposes be termed the national socialist elite’. The gung-ho free marketeers who rode to power with Thatcher in 1979 don’t seem to have been aware of the Nazi prelude, although they would have known of later privatisations in ...”

“... the drama of her life – her sexuality, her isolation, her love affairs and her exile – may take over from the poems. Her life is likely to rival that of Sylvia Plath as a subject for infinite fascination. It is vital to remember the power these poems had before the details of the poet’s life became public. Some letters are missing. Most of ...”

“... is no longer a curse, no longer a birthmark that you carry with you all your life. Rather, it may be fashioned from nothing: it’s a ‘personality bonus’ – words straight out of an Argos catalogue. And if Indianness is addable, it’s also subtractable. Karim, an aspiring actor, is keen to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of ...”

“... both the father telling the bedtime story and the child begging him not to leave anything out. He may write short, staccato lines, but he never collapses the distance between characters, they must be depicted as real people, always on the way and never quite arriving. In The Morning Star he hurries along as if he has someone to meet – his ...”

“... Having had mothers and fathers and the usual miserable battering of the sense of self by life may arouse the emotional pulsations of a story or a poem; but feeling is not sufficient for the essay. Comparisons roam about it, familiarity with those who have ploughed the field before … Tact and appropriateness play a part. How often we read a beginner’s ...”

“... a book on a toilet-seat, for example, or gun-grease derived from the fat of pigs or cows – may have major consequences elsewhere, and vice versa, the structure itself being sometimes transformed in the process. The ‘mediation’ through which a cultural structure constructs a personage or an event as significant – the death of a king, say ...”

“... valve; width of fissure 323 mm. The gas company blames the burst on subsidence but he thinks they may be trying to swing the inquiry in their favour. In February he delivers a mind-numbing tract on grain and grape harvests the previous year. At the end he announces he’ll be back shortly with more of the same once the session on the citrus harvest ...”

“... in fact diverting attention to the image and away from the underlying sense. The underlying sense may be no sense at all, as with the repeated use of train metaphors by campaigners to get the highest possible number of European countries to join the euro when it was launched. The train was about to leave the station, sceptics were told: you don’t want to ...”

“... Khodorkovsky would reply: ‘That’s exactly why I want you to understand it.’ The following may not count as evidence, but I heard Khodorkovsky read some of his declarations to the court this past spring and summer, some merely procedural, others more general and philosophical, which he had composed the night before, and it was clear from the pride with ...”

“... is unlikely that Blair got his taste for military action from that source. But Thomson’s example may account for another leitmotif of Blair’s personal philosophy and of this memoir: his obsession with what he calls ‘grip’. Faced with a challenge, Blair believes you have to do two things: first, you think it through; then you grip it. Merely ...”

“... military insisted there was. Oppenheimer yielded to the president and his generals, supporting the May-Johnson Bill to create an Atomic Energy Commission with much secrecy and military influence. Anxious to remain an insider, he stumbled into a disastrous interview with Truman. Noticing that the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ seemed strangely ...”