“... 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, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that good public life could only be made up of the actions of good individual men – which may explain why, in a quixotic gesture unique in the history of politics, he gave away one-fifth of his personal fortune to the nation in the financial crisis of 1919. The meaning and consequences of Baldwin’s vision may be ...”

“... discourse in his milieu even if he was unable to control events’. The letters as we have them may well have been arranged in order to shape our sense of Cicero’s persona and significance, but we also have to allow systematically for what White calls ‘the letter-writing habits of a particular Roman milieu’. Those represented in the collection are ...”

“... British imperialism may have been oversold. Anti-imperialists tend to blame it for most of the problems of the modern world; a rather smaller band of apologists credits it with spreading modernity. These views are not incompatible: either way it is seen as crucial. Most of the popular debate centres on whether it was (or is) a force for good or for ill ...”

“... and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may betray affection for him, or at least an openness to sexual experimentation. Novelists, Jack believes, are under a professional obligation to be ‘odd’. And if Will’s novel turns out to be a hit and makes him a celebrity, he’ll need someone around to ...”

“... as a form of art.1 The name offered both anonymity and solidarity to the people who used it. In May 1995, around seventy Luther Blissetts assembled in front of the register office in Rome in the early hours of the morning to protest against the ‘fetish of identity’ and for the right to call yourself whatever you want, whenever you want. The Luther ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy ...”

“... immunity had been convenient for the government of the day, and especially so for MI5 (which may also have turned a blind eye to Kim Philby’s defection in 1963), since his arrest and trial would certainly have led to a thorough investigation of British intelligence organisations, entailing drastic changes (or the expensive pretence that such changes ...”

“... the most intimately known family of the English Middle Ages. The lives of kings and princes may be more celebrated, and we may have far more records relating to the major aristocratic families, but the Paston letters supply individual voices. The correspondence extends over four generations of both men and women ...”

“... 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 ...”