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“... producing what it’s best at producing, and exporting that abroad. The writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo are so influential in the trade world that most experts refuse even to discuss the merits of this basic laissez-faire assumption. The US, born out of a tax revolt in the same year that The Wealth of Nations was published, has long accepted it, and ...”

“... Hill’s need not exactly to spell but to articulate the word ‘atonement’ differently when he means at-one-ment is tacitly an admission that the two, the same and not the same, will always be magnetically held apart and held together by being like-poles. Kipling’s McAndrew discerned a Calvinistic predestination in ‘the stride o’ yon ...”

“... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without ...”

“... Bubushkin is its lengthy sampling of Vera’s, very infrequently Igor’s, private diaries – a means of recovering the missing dates of the letter sequence, and so completing an historical record from 1921 to the composer’s death on 6 April 1971. Robert Craft tells us that Vera’s diaries if published entire would amount to a ‘book or books of great ...”

“... or fame exceeded their proven abilities. Wittgenstein, the mathematician Max Newman, the economist David Champernowne, von Neumann, Robin Gandy the logician, were men with whom he could be at ease, free of the social patina and the trappings of respectibility which repelled him. There are records of Turing’s participation in pre-war Cambridge, in ...”

“... I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling ...”

“... Johnson proudly asserts that he makes no effort to ‘conceal’ his ‘opinions’. What this means is that his approach to history is polemical, one-sided and prone to gross oversimplifications. An excellent storyteller, he describes very well those figures from the past whom he admires, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the ...”

“... intellectual inspiration Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1979. ‘Nobody knows what it actually means.’ Hayek was in no doubt that patterns emerged in the behaviour of populations, and might eventually lead to a form of large-scale self-organisation. The best way of ensuring this happened was to build a communications infrastructure that would make it ...”

“... Roger Williamson was burned to death at Zandvoort in 1973, while his friend and fellow driver David Purley tried desperately to beat out the flames as millions of TV viewers watched, Lauda was asked by the press why he hadn’t stopped to help. ‘I’m paid to race,’ he said, ‘not to stop.’ The ‘formula’ of F1 refers to the various rules ...”

“... relations linking him with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), the last native Prince, but this by no means persuaded all the Welsh to see him plainly as their leader. The intrepid Dafydd Gam of Brecon, whose name commemorates a squint, gained legendary status as one of Glyn Dŵr’s most committed opponents. He died at Agincourt, among the many Welshmen serving ...”

“... that have held particular power over our imaginations. She admits an allergy to the latent.This means that her love fantasies follow a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early Christian ...”

“... answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the tide turned even earlier, in 1332, at the ...”

“... her a wonderful massage, and instantly transforms her from sex object to sensuous liberated woman. David Kunzle challenged this narrative in Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of Corsets, Tight Lacing and Other Forms of Body Sculpture in the West (1982), arguing that the dangers of corsets were exaggerated or even invented. Women, he claimed, wore corsets ...”

“... from Indian takeaways. Within a couple of paragraphs in Injury Time, he moves from Yeats to David Beckham to Dame Gillian Beer – consummations devoutly to be desired. He is consistently pleasantly unpredictable, in the way that, say, E.B. White was consistently pleasantly unpredictable, or perhaps Alastair Cooke delivering his weekly Letter from ...”

“... not extravagantly lamented, when she was 15, Angelica early on became the pride, joy and main means of financial support of her father, Johann Joseph, an itinerant decorative painter. The family moved to Milan when Angelica was about 13 and she was soon turning out highly saleable copies of Old Masters. Her childhood, such as it was, like that of her ...”