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“... If one wants an ear for dialogue and an eye for American grotesquerie one should go to J.F. Powers, now back in print in the UK after a long lapse.* What Carver excels at is creating a mood or atmosphere, often by concentrating on objects (no ideas but in things), and, luckily, it is not always an atmosphere of menace. In the better stories the mood is ...”

“... instrument of moral symbolisation seem to regard habeas corpus, the legal safeguards on the arrest powers of the police, the defence challenge of police evidence in courts and the public control of police expenditure and public order policy as unfortunate obstacles, and not as the stuff and substance of the law as a set of moral practices. The same people who ...”

“... learnt the way to read her book, or a great deal of it: which is to surrender our judgment and our powers of connected thinking into her hands. At each turn only she can tell us what to think next. Our role is to nod excitedly when she reminds us (or makes us think we remember) that stewardesses have recently started to behave badly to mothers, and then nod ...”

“... The serene face of Michael Faraday radiates from all directions: first in disguised profile on a postage stamp, then more handsomely on the £20 note. Illuminating the dark warrens of the London Underground, he now advertises an exhibition at the Science Museum to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth. Visitors to this intimate and thoughtful display are reminded of how much the modern world owes to the gentle giant of experimental science, whose insights into electro-magnetism were eventually to find application in motors and machines which transformed human life even as they transformed electrical currents ...”

“... millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy conurbation, unfathomable, inchoate, yet liveable and boundlessly energetic. London confers prosperity on the rest of Britain rather than drains it away, they say. It is ...”

“... malevolent, piteous or merely inaccurate, ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in ...”

“... the plot of the Bush administration to abolish many civil liberties and concentrate autocratic powers in the hands of the president. ‘The Congress lacks authority,’ a recent analysis from the Office of Legal Counsel states, ‘to set the terms and conditions under which the president may exercise his authority as commander-in-chief to control the ...”

“... the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as told by Michael Scharf, a one-time US appointee at the UN and a Tribunal insider, is full of unexpected and telling ironies. Not the least of these concerns the involvement of the US Administration, which had previously been so worried about the possibility of having to ...”

“... defeat of Kolchak and all the rest, after the recognition of the Bolshevik regime by the Western powers, that I begin to see – imprinted in their faces – the recognition that they would never return. A new grimness and bleakness are evident in their eyes. They have come face to face with the irrevocable. This is one of the great themes of exile: how the ...”

“... were one of the crucial forms of ideological as well as practical control sought by the Western powers. Hygiene and order, held to be so contrary to native social systems, were to be imposed. The control of not uncommon epidemics became a central symbolic marker of what Western science and enlightenment might bring. The ...”

“... Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum ...”

“... There is another question on which I am out of line, this time in disagreement with my old friend Michael Foot. Five 20th-century prime ministers and one non-premier (Joseph Chamberlain) have statues in the lobby of the House of Commons: Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill and Attlee. The inclusion of Joseph Chamberlain seems rather odd unless it be ...”

“... peasant who, having stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind ...”

“... able to imagine, a tale of moral and psychological harrowings which only a writer of considerable powers, both of patience and invention, could risk or pull off. This novel has been ‘anxiously mediated’, in Conrad’s phrase, and patches of its careful prose feel as if they may have been polished once or twice too often, as in ‘there were larks and ...”

“... characteristics, Carpenter outlined his vision. The Uranians, of mixed sexual type and prophetic powers, would initiate ‘a new chivalry’. Women would be rescued from the tombs of orthodox division of labour, bourgeois sexuality overthrown, and a true ‘inner’ democracy would flourish. Nietzsche was now welcomed, as a ‘healthy reaction’ to ...”