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“... you have a very different picture. In 1978, however, Penguin Classics promoted a competition for best suggestion for a new translation of a foreign text – which I won with the declaration that in the year 1978 (the 1100th anniversary of Edington) Penguin Classics had no choice at all but to translate Asser’s Life of Alfred, written in a foreign language ...”

“... likely to be his first port of call. MacLeod’s main characters are the Beaumonts: dependable Geoffrey, whose mother died in an asylum, so that he longs for a solid conventional life, and clever, arty Evelyn, in revolt against her oppressively snobbish parents. Her choice of Geoffrey, a bank manager, secured their ...”

“... and others. In fact, American fears go rather deeper, and explain why the US Government did its best to sabotage the prospect of a truly effective court. The abuses against Somalis committed by the Belgian paratroopers – along with Canadians, Italians, Malaysians and others – were largely the result of individual soldiers getting out of control, and the ...”

“... not much asked and when it was sometimes prompted a quizzical look suggesting it was a question best left unput; that, or a sad smile implying Clive had succumbed not to any particular ailment but to the general tragedy that is life itself. Spoken or unspoken, the uncertain circumstances of the death, its remote location and the shocking prematureness of it ...”

“... In choosing this line from Pound’s 11th Canto as one of the epigraphs to his Collected Poems, Geoffrey Hill concentrates our attention on one of the central problems posed by Pound’s poetry and explored by his own. Beauty is no absolute guarantee of truth or morality; art may illuminate or corrupt. As David Perkins points out in Modernism and ...”

“... a remarkable success. It was first published in Lima, its subject, in 1986, but at once became a best-seller throughout Latin America. It is said to have been read with interest in China and the Soviet Union, and this summer de Soto was invited to Washington to discuss it with the American Treasury Secretary. De Soto says he was prompted to write it by Mario ...”

“... pays to make a pact neither to commit nor to suffer injustice.’ Justice is ‘midway between the best condition – committing injustice without being punished – and the worst – suffering injustice without getting revenge’. It is honoured, if at all, ‘out of inability to do wrong’. The contrary view is that justice should be independent of existing ...”

“... as he has himself admitted when the more poker-faced have tried to make him face himself: at his best, just a dazzling writer who, despite his theory, sees and feels the tension between language and experience. Heath is simply shrill and uninfected, puritanical too, and the theoretical weakness which he shares with Foucault, the inability convincingly to ...”

“... that democracy needs. We are hearing about how to find what Matthew Arnold called one’s ‘best self’. The question is not just what, now, sanctifies marriage. It is also what, now, in Depression and War, sanctifies America. Men and women as men and women, and as citizens too, are accordingly divorced from an unreflective past into a deeply green ...”

“... from such illusion, we see ourselves as perhaps we really are. In a chapter which is the very best discussion of the idea of ‘ideology’ I know, Geuss detects in Habermas three tactics to such self-awareness. The first and most obvious is to show that our beliefs do not correspond with the way the world is; the second is to show that they have origins ...”

“... manner, but it doesn’t tell us the whole story of how disdain and self-mockery might, in the best of his poems, become an aggrieved prologue to words of love. How did Corbière become ‘this warped, unloved, insufferable man’, to borrow from his poem, ‘Femme’? We know more about Corbière’s early adolescence than about any other period of his ...”

“... Geoffrey Parker’s new book on the Thirty Years’ War is the first major study of the subject to appear in English for nearly half a century. To be more exact, it is now 47 years since the publication of a book on the war by C.V. Wedgwood, as she was then. That graceful and perceptive study – a remarkable achievement for a 28-year-old historian – remains an example of traditional narrative history at its formal best ...”

“... In a court in western Kenya, on 13 July 1934, Major Geoffrey Selwyn and his wife, Helen, were jointly charged with the murder of a ‘native’. Geoffrey Selwyn, my father-in-law, died before the trial began. Proceedings continued in his absence, and my children’s grandmother was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison ...”

“... Vaizey has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war ...”

“... states stand with respect to health, literacy and purchasing power, the Japanese already do best. The development has been extraordinary. But there is nothing inherently mysterious about it. The decision to put growth first was taken more than a hundred years ago in response to Japan’s weakness against the great powers. It took time to work out the ...”