“... for electoral reasons. The desirability of owning one’s house has a long history in all English-speaking countries and there are good social arguments for private ownership. But there is a thin line between social desirability and political calculation, and Thatcher crossed it with complete insouciance. The mandatory sale of council housing was ...”

“... Lhasa has formed in the town around the nucleus of the Dalai Lama: schools teach in Tibetan and English, there are various government ministries, a national library, a troupe which preserves and performs Tibetan dances and songs. Versions of the main Tibetan monasteries have been built where the monks go about their business dressed in an unlikely ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... 19th century. Gradgrindism, as they might have said, was no accident. When, a few years later, an English translation of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature appeared with an introduction by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a close associate at Cambridge, the group felt that at last they had the theoretical tools they needed. Life could not be reduced to mere ...”

“... to the unfolding national crisis. Ponderings II-VI, the first volume to be translated into English, covers the period from 1931 to 1938 (the notebook from 1930 has not been found). It is in 1931 that Heidegger first begins to notice a change, and ‘the political stirring of the young people’. He feels their ‘desire to come again onto a ...”

“... minutes of the Assembly, his 36-man delegation included ‘Arabs, Chaldaeans, Prussians, Poles, English, Swiss, Germans, Dutchmen, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards, Americans, Indians, Syrians, Brabaçons, Liégeois, Avignonnais, Genevans’. Moved by their entreaties, the deputies not only reserved a special place for foreigners at the celebrations on 14 ...”

“... worked for Darwin among others, Hawkins worked on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs with the scientist Richard Owen, who had coined the word ‘dinosaur’ (from the Greek deinos, ‘terrible’, and sauros, ‘lizard’) in 1841. Theirs was the first attempt to revivify dry fossil bones and even drier scientific discourse for a large public. Though the sculptures ...”

“... half days – he managed to come third, two places behind Ruqayyah Rida, one of the most talented English girls ever to have played the game. In reality, oceans of ability lay between Charlie and Rida; he was just thrilled to find himself on an adjacent board to her. But he was also developing new levels of patience: one of his games in Nottingham drifted ...”

“... property, and tapping the expatriate communities in Europe and the United States, along with English-speaking Africa. One ‘frequent flyer’ businessman I met in Onitsha boasted that he had made a handsome profit by flogging pirated copies of Living in Bondage (1995) to his connections in Italy, where he regularly travelled to buy water ...”

“... to and from the rest of his body. Imagine that. Or imagine people who speak a language just like English, except that when they are tired they talk of coming down with ‘the fatigues’. Or that two coffee tasters have come to dislike the house blend, but one of them says the taste has changed while the other says he no longer likes it. What should we say ...”

“... before the war and advocated a federation of the world’s democracies, attracted the Tory MP Richard Law as well as supporters as diverse and unlikely as Bevin and the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek. Another groupuscule, Union and Reconstruction, foresaw a national rebirth which would end unemployment and hunger. This was outlined in the polemic ...”

“... Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. McGreevy flits in and out of the lives of ...”

“... Borges’ is mentioned in ‘Things’, one of Borges’s best poems.) Fanny and her sons spoke English at home; Fanny ran the household as though they were in England. Borges was deeply attached to his grandmother; her version of England was as influential as his mother’s account of the family’s former splendour. Fanny travelled to Europe with the ...”

“... and left to run wild in a nature reserve, the Oostvaardersplassen. And Milton Keynes? ‘The English new towns were an inspiration for us,’ van Hulten said, and he smiled at me kindly as though I were a long-lost relative. He was one of the architects of Flevoland, and one of its early inhabitants. He and his wife were among the first 400 settlers of ...”

“... of these musicians is a virtuoso of one or another aspect of pop. Yet the first book to appear, by Richard Witts, tackles the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground were decidedly not these kinds of virtuoso. There are confirmed music fans who can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’). With a ...”