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“... under the age of 50, the odds are that you’re not, and if you’re under the age of 30, you may well be bloody furious. Britain has become a polity plagued by a fear of its own rejuvenation. How has this situation come about? It’s tempting to view the division in wholly ‘cultural’ terms – a clash of values. This story is well ...”

“... extreme actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... and the handsome profits made by Quaker companies like Barclay’s and Lloyd’s banks, Bryant and May matches, Swan Hunter shipbuilders and Cadbury itself. In Victorian Britain, Quaker businessmen had competitive advantages. Ron Davies, in his biography of George Stephenson (Quakers were early financiers of the railways), talks about a Quaker ‘moral ...”

“... younger royals instinctively understand that they are a sort of super pop-star, and, while they may occasionally complain about it, the fact is that, as any pop star must, they court tabloid attention, are indeed largely tabloid inventions. Their lives seem to be constructions of sheer kitsch, in the approved tabloid style of thunderous bad taste. No wonder ...”

“... specialists. These are generally interpreted as moves towards a more mercantile economy; but there may well have been a shortage of native talent as a result of alarmed opposition exercised by those in authority, who resented new paths to advancement that bypassed old landed values altogether. When the poet Theognis complained that money was now the root of ...”

“... francs, making him ‘among the very richest people’ in Europe. Despite this, he died, to use Theresa May’s phrase, a ‘citizen of nowhere’, and his estate, as Jessica Marglin details in this absorbing microhistory, became the subject of celebrated lawsuits.Shamama was born in the hāra, the old Jewish quarter of Tunis. His family were ...”

“... the great postmodern meganovels by Pynchon or Perec, Bolaño or García Márquez; and it may be said to rival even New Athens itself, of which the equally historical poet Elżbieta Drużbacka says: ‘This volume is so strangely magical that an endless reading is permitted in which one picks and pecks here and there, always finding interesting ...”

“... advertising genius. There were hire-purchase schemes, temporary price reductions, free lives of St Theresa of Lisieux, incentives for enlisting colleagues and an excellent mail-order service. Editors were bribed to reproduce Migne’s hyperbole as their own. He claimed to have 50,000 letters of praise from his fellow priests (who never numbered more than ...”

“... dala (the colloquial term in Niger) – is a legacy of this era. Both words derive from the Maria Theresa thaler, a trade currency minted in Austria and several other places, including Mumbai, which at the height of the mercantile era circulated from the Gulf of Aden to the Gulf of Mexico.When colonialism became a matter for the state – India passing from ...”

“... that they had never told, or ever would tell, anything but the truth. Courage and hardware may win wars, but cunning deception is just as surely a helpful friend. And this erasure of guilt for indulgence in ‘double standards’ has suited all sides and combatants, is quite in line with the manichaean ferocities of war, especially of big-scale ...”

“... which also happens to be the period after which deportation is automatic, which means they may just as well have been turned around at the port of entry. The Cambridge report records the story of one victim of trafficking who was sentenced to two consecutive periods of 12 months for using a false document with intent and making a false statement for ...”

“... along in the mythical underbelly of America … there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding,’ she writes. ‘Idealism came back in style. People got along for a while’: this is the refrain she weaves throughout the story. ‘Inside the melting pot. Inside the melting ...”

“... was declared.My father wanted his first child to be a boy.Barbara Holly Goldin. Date of birth: 21 May 1946.Sex: female.Family photographs arrange themselves on the three screens, supplemented by Goldin’s more recent pictures. She tells us that Barbara started playing the piano at the age of four and taking lessons aged six. She liked to mother, and later ...”

“... the Germans established the ghetto of Theresienstadt, north of Prague (named after Empress Maria Theresa, who in 1744 issued an edict limiting the number of Jewish families in Moravia), and that the remaining Jews of Austerlitz almost certainly perished there, or later in Auschwitz, where most of the inmates of Theresienstadt were eventually taken. He might ...”

“... of), there were spots of disillusion already visible on the sunlit uplands.Five days before B-Day, Theresa Villiers, the environment secretary, standing in her wellies in a farmyard, told the BBC that the UK would not be importing chlorinated chicken or hormone-fed beef from the US or anywhere else. Both of these products are ‘illegal under EU law which we ...”