“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be a hallucination, and have admired the way in which Kipling handles the ‘ambiguity’. He may have adapted the technique of it from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which he also much admired, and he uses the same device in other stories, notably the earlier ‘Mrs Bathurst’. The significant point, however, is that the impression of wickedness ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spontaneous invention, and some speculation of a more modern sort about the kind of person Pilate may have been. What makes the book so tiresome is a deliberate failure to distinguish between invention and report, made all the more confusing by the author’s self-indulgent taste for digression. One’s attention is abruptly diverted from the life of Pilate ...”

“... the men strong and in fighting mood’. The victims of rape are usually reluctant to speak out and may be accused of betrayal and rejected by their peers and their families. Those who bear the children of the enemy are stigmatised, even ostracised. Some contract Aids or other sexually transmitted diseases; all experience physical and psychological ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to see President Hayes unveil a statue of Halleck in the so-called Poet’s Corner of America which, until that day, had contained memorials only to English and Scottish writers ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Other in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In particular, drugs were thought to ...”

“... was of US making: a dispatch sent to the Italian police in March 2003 which claimed that Omar ‘may have travelled’ to ‘an unknown country in the Balkans’. This (vague) false trail may have encouraged the police not to take too much trouble over the investigation. The case went cold, in part because the judge then ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if they didn’t. George Bush called it ‘a defining moment’ for the new Iraq. This time Bush may be right; although, once again, he may not understand the seriousness of the fight he is getting into. The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and ...”