“... it occupied a place in the national curriculum long after it had become extinct in speech. This may have happened around 2000 BC, but its later role was similar to that of Latin in the Middle Ages. A school text quoted by Andrew George in his new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh makes a sardonic point about Sumerian and its importance: The door monitor ...”

“... which, in their different ways, Freud and Peter Gay have made their own, sheer bulk of documents may to some extent compensate for this difficulty. In the 17th century, the problem of psychological interpretation is altogether more intractable. That 17th-century characters had psychologies, as much as any later characters, ...”

“... or logical, arising out of the very nature of thought. His denial of both kinds of limit may be valid on philosophical grounds, because science has been defined as embracing all those problems that are in principle open to empirical observation and solution, but it is contrary to practical experience. Whatever I did discover I could have discovered ...”

“... deviant case’: i.e. they could not understand it. A few concrete examples from recent events may help to confuse the issue even further. Item: a government whose leader is pledged to a ‘constitutional crusade’ to make the Republic’s. Constitution more acceptable to Northern Unionists is simultaneously promoting a constitutional amendment on ...”

“... job is a dirty one, best left to friends and allies, although their own tanks or marines may have to be used in the last resort. But the techniques approved for firefighting differ a little. The Russians, in their thrifty way, appreciate friends who know how to use the truncheon, the censor’s scissors and the psychiatric ward. The Americans believe ...”

“... its force from a deep commitment to the benefits of continuity and a fear that adversary politics may lead to sharp reversals by incoming governments of policies devised by their predecessors, which the civil service played a great part in developing.’ ‘Thus,’ he argues, ‘when the civil servants see a new government come into power with a policy that ...”

“... morality. Here Hampshire is in agreement with many contemporary philosophers, while Walzer may have ordinary usage on his side. I do not believe that it matters who is ‘correct’ on this point of usage, but it is important to note the difference in order to be clear about the difference between Walzer’s and Hampshire’s positions. As I have ...”

“... controlled the censorship. It is very difficult to find out what ordinary people thought. They may have accepted the orthodoxy of their betters, though there are many indications that this was not the case. But if they did hold unorthodox views there was no prospect of getting them printed, except when the orthodox refuted and denounced them. Only in the ...”

“... to be me and not somebody’s idea of me.’ The final verdict on the television election, then, may be that both its novelty and its impact were much overrated; that, given the changes in technology and idiom, most of the tricks of populist media manipulation had been tried before – and anyway they did not make any difference in the end. What mattered was ...”

“... it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We may be on dodgy ground, then, lumping together two Mexican novels – one about the South American uprising of 1810 and one about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century – but for the fact that both try to explain something about how ...”

“... of your devotion as you have been of mine.’ Auberon explains: ‘I do not think, as others may decide, that the ... sentence was intended ironically. Or at any rate, not very ironically. It certainly was not intended as an embittered father’s curse.’ Well, he should know – except that, on the matter of his dad, Auberon Waugh is not the most ...”

“... like the northern coast of Florida, we can put some of the blame on the government itself, which may have had something to do with the creation of Area X in the first place. In other words, the tile-carpeted, air-conditioned office is where VanderMeer locates the seeds of destruction. This is the case not just literally – because we all know that in ...”

“... The two sides killed each other, as well as many civilians, and blood feuds were born. On 17 May 1999, Israelis elected Ehud Barak on the strength of his promise to reverse Ariel Sharon’s Lebanon adventure, which had by then cost around a thousand Israeli lives. Barak announced that Israel would pull out in an orderly fashion in July 2000, provided ...”

“... he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1. The standard Latin text of Catullus’ works (which may or may not include this ‘witty booklet’) is one of the slimmest volumes in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and yet this diminutive collection of ‘trifles’, as Catullus calls them, has generated enough commentary ...”

“... theological certainties and subtleties, which the experts understand and which some of them may well think consistent with their own religious positions. Conventional pieties do occasionally peep through the prose of the catalogue and the TV commentaries, where they are rather heavily underlined by John Tavener’s music for the title ...”