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“... Certainly not the saddest for historians, according to Geoffrey Hawthorn’s wonderfully playful and intelligent book: rather, the most instructive. Hawthorn is intrigued by the philosophical standing of counter-factuals – hypothetical ‘other worlds’ – and their usefulness for historians and social scientists ...”

“... actor belatedly trying to discover what crime or crimes his father may have committed long ago. Geoffrey Elder is introduced as a former friend, now deceased, by Julian Symons himself, who purports merely to have edited the thespian’s posthumous ms. Symons admits to shaping and sharpening the presentation of Elder’s findings, and to cutting out ...”

“... daughters by a previous marriage on a motor-tour of Tuscany. The choice fell on Maynard Keynes and Geoffrey Scott, who proved to be ‘nice, intellectual boys’ who did not lead the girls into any ‘nonsense’. Scott was recently down from Oxford, with a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist but no obvious vocation, and Mary Berenson, who had a ...”

“... The focus of Geoffrey Moorhouse’s book is a great church with one of the most recognisable profiles in Europe: Durham Cathedral. The ‘last office’ – ‘office’ in its specialised meaning of a communal act of worship – was the last sung service of the Benedictine monks, which closed their life at Durham in the time of Henry VIII, on 31 December 1539 ...”

“... Cardenas had nationalised the concessions in Mexico. This, however, cut his industry off from the best technical and economic advice. The Venezuelans were shrewder. In 1943, they had passed a law which required the country’s revenues from oil to equal those going to the companies and the United States Government. A few years later, Venezuela asked to be ...”

“... Przeworksi doesn’t talk much about Britain, but in his marvellously sharp analysis, quite the best that there’s been of his subject for years, he explains why this must be so. A party of the Left in an industrial society represents and draws support from labour. But labour, wage-earning manual labour, has only once constituted even half the ...”

“... and good to read. Diana Raby’s account of how Chávez’s Venezuela has come to be is one of the best (she is an academic as well as an activist). And the Crisis Group’s fair-mindedness is admirable. But the languages of socialist hope and liberal fear, although not absent from Latin America itself, do not there connote what they do to us. The criollos ...”

“... practice of idle, complacent life-style-massage. Until recently, Amanda Cross was Virago Crime’s best-selling author by far. Now, however, she has been taken over by Sara Paretsky, author to date of 11 low-rent crime thrillers featuring private eye V.I. Warshawski, or Vic for short. It’s easy to understand why readers like Vic so much, especially when you ...”

“... less. In France and Italy and Spain and Portugal, Communists have turned this way and that and at best made no ground. They were thrown into disarray by Hungary and Khrushchev’s speech against Stalin in 1956 and again by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In Italy, their subsequent conversion to parliamentary democracy was put into doubt by Allende’s ...”

“... into that; and the heart that I have studied has been my own. How many times have I felt at my best moments the cold of the scalpel sliding into my flesh! Bovary (to a certain extent, as far as the bourgeois is concerned, as far as I have been able, so that it can be more general and more human) will be in this respect the very sum of my psychological ...”

“... He says he finds that ‘older men’ – by which he means those over forty – ‘make the best subjects,’ which would explain the contents (James Hewitt to Henry Kissinger by way of Geoffrey Boycott, Charlton Heston, Dave Lee Travis and Norman Tebbit), but you have to wonder how much of a coincidence it is that ...”

“... from?’ Lapsley asked him at the end of the dinner to which he had brought his latest discovery, Geoffrey Madan. Madan was a dazzlingly precocious Eton schoolboy with a natural deference to the old and without the trait of shyness which in some takes the form of brashness. At the age of 13 he was engaging in conversation Blanche Cornish, wife of the ...”

“... himself should lead for the prosecution. In the other corner, Adams was represented by Geoffrey Lawrence QC, one of the most skilful advocates of his day, whose normal practice lay in the civil rather than the criminal courts. Not for him the faded Rumpole clichés of ‘I am bound to put it to you, Mr Snooks, that what you are telling My Lord and ...”

“... become a major part Of Indian public finance. Their effectiveness in promoting social ends is at best abysmal,’ Joshi and Little argue, ‘at worst counter-productive.’ In the last two years of Rao’s Government, there was still no overall strategy, and little had been done to try to explain the reforms. The reason, as Joshi and Little say, is not far ...”

“... own random revenge. But the true mood of the British army was less hatred than angry frustration, best expressed by a graffiti exchange on a wall in Jerusalem described by Piers Brendon in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (2007). Under the Zionist slogan ‘Tommy Go Home,’ one such Tommy replied: ‘I Wish I Fucking Well Could.’ These events are ...”