“... skyscrapers designed by celebrity architects, flanked by shopping malls displaying every Western brand, and serviced by wage-slaves from South Asia and the Philippines. Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, was founded when the Old Testament was still being written, edited and collated. It’s true that the new Mövenpick hotel in the heart of the city’s diplomatic ...”

“... a web-based guide to reading The General Theory). Instead, his subject is the politics of the brand of liberal technocracy to which Keynes’s name was attached. From the first, Keynesianism was defined in opposition to an ‘old’ or ‘paleo’ liberalism anchored in individual rights organised primarily around property. From that followed a dogmatic ...”

“... revelation, and a virtual doctor of the Church, expounding theology with supreme authority – ‘Thomas Aquinas in drag’, as one critic called her. All the while she remains the same Florentine lady he cherished on Earth.Throughout his life, Dante engaged in an audacious project of self-exegesis and self-correction. The Vita Nuova anthologises his earlier ...”

“... her own idiosyncrasies had become a survival mechanism.’ It had also become part of her brand. When Édouard Dubufe painted her portrait for the Salon of 1857, she insisted on replacing the ‘boring table’ he had envisaged with a giant bull’s head, painted by herself. The hulking beast upstaged Dubufé’s stilted portrait and pointed to the ...”

“... you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who used initials for their forenames – H.E. Bates, W.H. Davies, L.P. Hartley. Yet early reviews compared Coppard to Hardy, Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, and he was acclaimed by (among others) Ford Madox ...”

“... partly thanks to the classic splendour of the OUP production, but it is unlikely to be the last. Thomas Cranmer and his fellow Protestants felt that Latin excluded uneducated laity from the proper praise of God, and designed the first English BCP in 1549 to replace the Latin liturgy of the Western Church. Yet Cranmer had absolutely no objection to Latin as ...”

“... lectures and presentations, became a little threadbare, itself a form of cultural tourism. A brand statement. Almost a slogan for selling fetishised rucksacks, hiking boots and Moleskine notebooks. Herzog said that he expected his books to long outlive his films. But there are many nice contradictions in play: the anathematiser of mass tourism is himself ...”

“... sliced-thin sentences leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by wiring themselves into consumer culture, conspiracy theory, pop iconography and spy-craft technology, trying to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel ...”

“... Terry Harknett writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic ...”

“... pretty systems’ that we ‘soon find ourselves obliged to destroy’. Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn could not have put it better. In fact, Kuhn begins The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by echoing Priestley and identifying Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity as an example of a new and instantly convincing ...”

“... Saint and, even more so, James Bond: the unflappable elegance, the insouciant brutality and the brand names (Raffles’s Sullivans, Bond’s Chesterfields and Morlands), the insistence on the best champagne and on the shaken-not-stirred martinis. The escapades of both heroes deploy the latest miracles of technology. Raffles exploits all the resources of the ...”

“... on 24 January 2003: Andy – one of our royal policemen (St James’s Palace) has obtained the brand new Green Book, the telephone directory with all the phone numbers of the royal family and their household staff. Incredibly useful … The standard price is £1000. So far so good. But I had a heck of a time getting cash creds signed off by Stuart ...”

“... and life flourished.The second evolutionary leap was made, as Lovelock sees it, in 1712, with Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the atmospheric engine. In itself, this modest apparatus doesn’t suggest the dawn of a new era: a small fire heats water, driving steam into a cylinder; the steam is then quickly condensed, creating a partial vacuum that allows ...”

“... a billion people in the 20th century alone – and blinded and disfigured many more. It was, as Thomas Macaulay said, ‘the most terrible of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of ...”