“... Thirties is readily paralleled by, for example, the injection of taxpayers’ money into British Steel by none other than Keith Joseph himself when at the Department of Trade and Industry. But in neither case is there any hint of credence being given to the view that government action, of whatever kind, can of itself create jobs for which there is no genuine ...”

“... Henry de Mille, was an Episcopal minister who became a playwright, one of the theatre producer David Belasco’s first collaborators. He discouraged his sons William and Cecil from going into the theatre but they didn’t listen. William de Mille, Agnes’s father, became a successful New York playwright, known for dramas with a social conscience; Cecil ...”

“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

“... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...”

“... Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and an Italian called Ascanio Sobrero produced nitroglycerine; it was the year of the first double-decker bus, horse-drawn, of course, produced by Adams and Co. of Bow, London; it was also the year a Patent Mile Index was fitted to a London cab: the ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... finding ‘efficiencies’ and generating savings. McKinsey helped nationalise British Steel, and then helped privatise it. In 1967, the British Transport Docks Board commissioned it to produce a report on containerisation. Dockers in London and Liverpool had been striking throughout the year in an attempt to decasualise the process of hiring ...”

“... verticality of the classical tradition. Brick and wood are far more common than raw concrete or steel, and the brick is sometimes ingeniously used, as in the curved garden walls of E. Morton Wright’s Morden Road Mews, which loop round the tiny houses. Francisco Sutherland documents some striking landscape effects around the heath. One photograph shows its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... coral towards the surface is a way of tracking the even slower subsidence of the ocean floor. As David Dobbs observed in Reef Madness (2005), Darwin’s account of atoll formation has similarities with his later theory of natural selection. Tiny creatures can build islands; minute variations can create species. Both theories offer a natural-historical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a wooden cupboard, about the size of a telephone box, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool – had been invented in 1940 by the eccentric Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for the purpose of improving its users’ ‘orgastic potency’ and by extension their general, and above all mental, health. It became fashionable in the 1950s and ...”

“... Her 2009 Venice Biennale installation, Eleven Heavy Things, featured a series of interactive steel and fibreglass sculptures. One piece included three pedestals labelled ‘The Guilty One’, ‘The Guiltier One’, ‘The Guiltiest One’, arranged in ascending height. Visitors were invited to choose a pedestal to stand on and position their own guilt ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”