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“... awareness of the unity of the society quite absent in 11th-century Europe. In Japan, there was at best ‘feudalism’. These are striking arguments, but, thus qualified, correct. The question is: do we really want such neutral reports? We clearly do if we want to move to Runciman’s second kind of understanding, to explanation. Reports which rule out the ...”

“... that some subjects are not good subjects anyway – just as anthologies are not necessarily the best form of bookmaking. Poems have as obstinate a life of their own as hamsters or baby pythons, and may profit as little from being gift-wrapped. Whoever edits, say, a gathering of Satirical Verse is going to have to fight the fact that Absalom and Achitophel ...”

“... like marriage, sexual happiness or career success are scaled into insignificance. Thus in ‘Geoffrey and the Eskimo Child’, originally published in this journal, we trace in 18 pages the 18 years of Geoffrey and Tania’s marriage. In 1962 he gets an LSE first in the then fashionable social sciences. They ...”

“... about the world’s esteem, a loyal support to his mother, destined for Princeton like his brother Geoffrey. Jack is a liar and a thief, graceless and violent. Both are versions of Tobias Wolff himself, alternating throughout this exhilarating memoir of his childhood. It is the story, not of the American dream, but of what Wolff and others in the book settle ...”

“... the Black or The Charterhouse of Parma, but in an important sense it is closer to us: it is the best novel ever written on parliamentary democracy, on that ‘seductive blend of hypocrisy and lies which is called representative government’. It is set in the reign of the ‘Citizen King’ Louis-Philippe, brought to power by the Revolution of July ...”

“... in 1991, about $300,000 every working day, $37,500 every working hour. He was, it’s true, the best rewarded of the ten executives who received more than $11 million that year. (If O’Reilly had been running something in Japan, Luttwak points out, he’d have probably been paid about $400,000 and received about as much again in fringe benefits.) But ...”

“... Sir Geoffrey Elton’s latest reflections on the state and status of his subject illustrate the Coleridgean maxim that a man is more likely to be right in what he affirms than in what he denies. Arising from lectures delivered, one imagines, off the cuff to an audience at the University of Michigan, they consist for the most part of soundings-off against a rogues’ gallery of ideological and academical types and tendencies which he believes constitute a threat to the proper study and use of the past ...”

“... false passes. ‘Sauve qui peut,’ he said. ‘Il faut se débrouiller.’ Get out of this as best you can. Albert Hirschman would say that he’d been a débrouillard all his life. He’d left Berlin in 1933, sought an education in Paris and London, fought in Spain, worked in Trieste, fled back to France, enlisted, and with the rest of his émigré ...”

“... by a stenographer. Armatta deals uncritically with the way we handled, or rather mishandled, the best piece of evidence in the whole case: a video revealing that Milosevic established the paramilitary Red Berets as early as May 1991 to fight in other states of the former Yugoslavia. The witness we called, Kapetan Dragan, a paramilitary leader, had conned ...”

“... distortion. The same intimate apprehension of time and space informs ‘A Place in Tuscany’, the best of the two travel essays in the book. It is about the remote Italian village where Malouf spends part of every year. It has at its centre the arrival of an Australian camera crew in mid-winter, just managing to get through the snow and ice, in order to make ...”

“... through these various voices. The result is similar in spirit to Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts or Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, a scrupulous tilling and scouring of the poet’s homeland. Despite her marked territoriality, there is an aura of communion in Oswald’s work (communion with God, nature, language – anything to hand) which can at times seem ...”

“... better things need passion: and passion is not latent in me, it never grew there – at best I mourn it.’ There was more to Noel, though, than just ‘atrophied feelings’. On her first camp with Rupert, at Penshurst in July 1909, she admitted that she was ‘driven silly with love’. But this was a reason to deny love admission to her ...”

“... which informs it, and then deliberately drops the matter, remarking simply that it gives us the best perspective we can presently get. Yet not only he, because he takes a Marxist view, and Hinde, but Leach, and, most surprisingly and not a little paradoxically, Kolakowski too, take the same general stand. Agents’ accounts will not altogether do. Full ...”

“... as National Unity Day). All the towns and districts were then instructed to choose ‘the best and most trustworthy people’ to send to a ‘council of the land’ (sovet vseia zemli) to elect a new tsar. This was the origin of the Romanov dynasty, which lasted until 1917. The third fall of the Kremlin came in 1812, when Napoleon’s Grande Armée ...”

“... rage, romance and intuition more than analysis, and not always with enough evidence. Perhaps the best one can say is that in politics, he wanted the middle and working classes to fight through parliaments for day to day liberties, a visionary leader with powers in his person as well as a constitution to show what could be made of those, a free economy to ...”