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“... we encounter Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the slightly more contemporary figure of Theresa May, whose ambition to make Britain ‘the global leader in free trade’ Hannan quotes approvingly. Free trade is the great elixir. ‘Free trade doesn’t simply put more money into the hands of the lowest earners. It doesn’t just eliminate extreme poverty ...”

“... in the highlands of Papua New Guinea is one of the poorest and most lawless places on earth. On 18 May 2015 ten men armed with machetes, axes and homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles ...”

“... are sliding down the league tables of national wealth, income, longevity and productivity. This may reveal only our low expectations – but it may do something to explain why the public is so hard to arouse in the cause of political and administrative efficiency, and why it’s myopic to lash out at Whitehall rather than ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... two nations were fighting to decide to which of them ‘the empire of the seas shall belong’, may have overestimated the confidence of both sides, but the even-handedness of his judgment is more persuasive than the English posture of righteous defensiveness. Here as elsewhere Pincus’s decision to base so much of his account of Dutch politics on English ...”

“... The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it ...”

“... exhilaration was felt in Britain. Australians who had felt themselves to be in exile here, such as Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, hurried home to help with the crusade. Germaine Greer briefly ceased to knock her own country. Almost anything seemed possible. In three years, the dream collapsed, in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 ...”

“... the work seriously. Syberberg eschews a naturalistic or documentary style of presentation. There may be more hard facts than soft focuses in the film, but the facts are woven into images from which they are inseparable. They would not be much help in passing an exam in history or civics. In a work as full of conceit as it is of conceits, Syberberg shows an ...”

“... in Piero’s native town of Sansepolcro in the middle decades of the 15th century, the style may have seemed startling, but the content surely did not. Even the angels, the one major feature not explained by the Gospels, would have been familiar from earlier representations of the story. In the past they had usually been shown praying or reverently ...”

“... these criticisms. ‘Bloated and muddled’, Hofstadter calls Gebstedter, and many readers may agree. The book is long. It is a pot-pourri. It is repetitive. The structure is haphazard. These are fair criticisms, but they are criticisms which miss one essential point of what is new and interesting in the Hofstadter phenomenon. This is a quality perhaps ...”

“... Even more telling, he shows Henry to have been an efficient and discerning ruler. Odd as the claim may seem, although it would not have seemed at all strange to the King himself, Henry epitomised the ideal of the Renaissance prince, the focal point of a humanist enterprise aimed at educating the one person in the realm who had power over everything. When ...”

“... appears as something sublime; and a man who does not submit to the machinery, though submission may mean his death, is regarded as a sinner against some kind of divine order.’ Arendt’s sombre vision struck a nerve. In a memoir of New York intellectual life, Midge Decter has recalled the debates that raged in the early Fifties over Arendt’s ...”

“... F.R. Leavis, as well as about Measure for Measure, which Leavis admired and which Wittgenstein may or may not have read or seen but was not predisposed to like. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Hawkes is merely engaged in a ludic ramble. He earns some of his jokes, and one of the best things about his books is that ...”

“... 31 December 1765, Rousseau’s capacity for clear judgment faltered.’ Even the most paranoid may sometimes be right to believe they are suffering unjust persecution; but the effect of being right is almost sure to be to make them entertain even wilder suspicions. By this time, Rousseau had worn out his welcome at Môtiers, and had accepted Hume’s offer ...”

“... no more than rumour, like the one about Augustus and the figs. The most prolific court poisoner may have been the eunuch Bagoas, who is said to have killed two Persian kings before succumbing himself during a failed attempt on the life of Darius III (if you believe Diodorus of Sicily). During the long search for an elixir of life several Chinese emperors ...”