“... share a constellation of characteristic features. They are ‘internally discontinuous’; they may, accidentally as it were, achieve the status of a masterpiece, ‘but under no circumstance can it be a consistent, well-amalgamated masterpiece’; in them irony subverts the ‘unitary world view’ emblematic of the pre-modern epic. This means that these ...”

“... the Labour Party, putting the decision entirely in the hands of its members for the first time, may elect Jeremy Corbyn. It’s tempting to see this as another IDS moment. But it’s something more than that. The election of IDS was wishful, whereas this looks much more wilful. Deluded Tory members seemed genuinely to believe that Duncan Smith was a widely ...”

“... he must first analyse and internalise the lessons of earlier battles – even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German Army fought in the Warsaw Ghetto. The officer indeed succeeded in shocking others, not least because he is not alone in taking this approach. Many of his comrades agree that in order to save Israelis now, it is right to make use ...”

“... of romantic heroines. Like the tale of Tristan and Isolde, the shabby details of the Abdication may one day attract the magical and distilling art of some great maestro of human experience, a Shakespeare or a Wagner as yet unborn. It seems safe to predict that future generations will remember the King’s great matter of the Thirties, long after they have ...”

“... polemic was never very far away. The combination of diehard Unionism and Gaelic antiquarianism may have seemed unlikely, but the Tory Dublin University Magazine didn’t see why Catholic nationalists should have it all their own way, and in 1834 it published perhaps the single most influential Irish book review ever written, Samuel Ferguson’s attack on ...”

“... whose foreign countries figure as areas of darkness, where coups and crises are glimpsed but may remain inscrutable. Another is Ryszard Kapuściński, an expert in what his new book calls ‘confusion’, who has attended 27 revolutions in the Third World. These revolutions, he believably reports, have been confusions. There he sat in his writer’s ...”

“... productive and controversial as ever. The agenda he has set out is far from completion: indeed we may only just be appreciating its measure. The volume concludes with a lengthy commentary by Pocock himself which, in reviewing each of the essays, primarily asks, not how far his earlier positions are vindicated by them, but where we should go next. The last ...”

“... or cauchemar, as the Russians say – odd that they don’t have their own word for it. It may seem in order to Milton Friedman that Russian citizens trade in dollars as much as in roubles, that the road from the airport into town is marked by a procession of billboards advertising ventures with fly-by-night names like Inkombank and Discountbank, that ...”

“... while the tricyclics have unpleasant side-effects, like dryness of the mouth. Although they may possibly be less severe, Prozac, too, has side-effects; to name but a few: rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, headache, insomnia, anxiety, tremor, dry mouth, dizziness and difficulty in reaching orgasm. There is no such thing as a free lunch when taking ...”

“... The present sprawling chaos is just an echo of the past: ‘Today’s antipathy to planners may reflect Anglo-Saxon attitudes!’ But Porter does not settle for historical fatalism. From Tudor times, the refusal of the Corporation of the City of London to widen its area of responsibility to the growing suburbs around the Square Mile, and its determined ...”

“... old man. But the hedonistic aspect of Christmas finds its extreme expression in Japan, in what may well be an inadvertent pun on the double meaning of ‘Eve’: ‘Christmas Eve itself can also at times be turned from the temporal occasion of Holy Night into the very embodiment of consumerism – a young woman. “For all the Eves”, promises one ...”

“... Boyd is fond of verbal foreplay, though at sixty-odd pages (in a 324-page novel) the preliminaries may seem a little stretched for some, more impulsive, appetites. This, the Los Angeles section of the book (set in 1936), opens: ‘I turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove up Micheltoreno to the site. The day was cloudy and an erratic and nervy wind rattled the ...”

“... be tomorrow’s provider. ‘It’s a family thing,’ the barman of the Derby assures us, which may be a little hopeful. It is not that big a step from family to clan to tribe to race and all the consequent rivalries and hatred. But the idea that a stranger, in a city like New York, can turn up at a bar and find shelter and work says something for the ...”

“... What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?’ Immanuel Kant’s three questions, set forth in his Critique of Pure Reason as encompassing all the interests of his reason, were also those which Jean-Paul Sartre pursued throughout his life, however different he intended his answers to be from those of Kant ...”

“... very last did my path cross that of the Cambridge spies. It was on a warm, sunny afternoon last May at Kuntsevo Cemetery on the western outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim Philby. Guy Burgess had died in 1963, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean in 1983. Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent ...”