“... for the Arts and was to play a part in the creation of a new breed of quasi-poor. But what Lord Eccles said chimed with what other people, including economists, were saying. And with this easy elimination of poverty from the mind, it seemed wilfully pessimistic to go grinding on about the have-nots in society – indeed, there was no need to do ...”

“... purview, and also bred people, British in outlook and adventurous by disposition, who felt at home almost anywhere in its world-wide expanse – except in class-riven, social-mountaineering Britain itself. Kipling was one; another was Eric Shipton, born in 1907 in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, son of a tea planter who died before Eric was three. His formidable ...”

“... low-rent Lucifer – and was humming quietly. You’d be so – o – o – o – nice – to come home to! He reminded me at once of those hunky young hard-drinking sailors, packed into fresh clean whites and reeking of Old Spice, whom my mother somewhat recklessly dated before she finally got together with Turk in 1967. When I wasn’t riding my skateboard ...”

“... he had read with his friends in the Iron Guard in the 1970s: “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the Devil.”’The new pope was shown his palatial quarters by Georg Gänswein, Ratzinger’s personal secretary and prefect of the papal household. ‘As Gänswein fumbled with the light switch,’ Ivereigh writes, ‘Francis found himself peering ...”

“... or his saviour. Stephen does not realise it till quite late, not till after he has agreed to come home with Bloom. To feel himself generally doomed, while throwing away his only source of money, with nowhere to sleep that night, is of course only rational. Molly laid out the cards in bed that morning, after Bloom had brought her breakfast, and learned that ...”

“... overseas, mostly possessions and dominions. A map drawn at the time, and reproduced in a memoir by Lord Woolton, minister of food during the war, as well as on this page, drove home the point that if two or three supply routes were cut, hunger and shortages at home were sure to ...”

“... ability to remember things, but the drivel is different. Georgescu does have a fondness for The Lord of the Rings, the film version, using the sentiments of Gandalf and Galadriel as if they were his own. The most striking appropriation I saw, however, wasn’t from a movie. Filmed meeting voters in the street, Georgescu drew on a speech by the wartime ...”

“... that vexed his heart as he sailed the seas, labouring to save himself and to bring his comrades home. But his comrades he could not keep from ruin, strive as he might; they perished instead by their own presumptuousness. Fools, they devoured the cattle of Hyperion, and he, the sun-god, cut off from them the day of their homecoming. Goddess, daughter of ...”

“... collective farm in the rich Stavropol area of southern Russia, led the life of a little ‘country lord’. They all shared in the experience of racial mixing and Russian domination, in which the problem of ethnicity was solved by a unique and once envied form of suppression, disguised by both the pretence and the reality of a general levelling. The Soviet ...”

“... which a young French couple travel to England, the land of advanced philosophy, only to hurry back home after near-fatal experiences with English riots, prisons, highway robberies and insane asylums, not to mention the dreadful cooking. ‘The only difference I see between the English and the savages of Africa is that the latter spare the fair ...”

“... was that he had made contacts among the youthful aristocracy, especially with the young Lord Westport, who could take him on free holidays. A visit to Ireland, in this company, produced an early example of a historically-informed, slightly perverse sentence: ‘As to the rebellion [of 1798] in Ireland, the English I think use the amplifying, and the ...”

“... to assuage his humane impulses. Some of Shaw’s humane impulses were exercised, by letter, on Lord Alfred Douglas. Shaw’s only meeting with Douglas was at the Café Royal on the fateful afternoon in 1895 when Frank Harris and Shaw tried to dissuade Oscar Wilde from the libel action he had set in train against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of ...”

“... of Sivrouka, Smith quickly incorporated him into the fantasy mise en scène as ‘her lord and master in the flesh’, showering him with caresses and ‘affectionate effusions’ in a weird pseudo-Sanskrit. Reliving scenes from her life as Marie Antoinette, Smith would flutter an imaginary fan, mimic taking snuff and throwing back a train, and ...”

“... of the top four conglomerates – chaebol, formed by analogy with ‘warlord’, means ‘cash-lord’ – are equivalent to over four-fifths of GDP. The two greatest disasters of modern Korean history created some of the conditions for all this. Japanese colonialism left behind a transport network and levels of literacy far above the regional ...”

“... the first two unsuccessful detonations of the dome: ‘Believers in the crowd let out that the Lord had heard their prayers and would not let the church be destroyed.’ ‘A third and final explosion dashed their hopes,’ Colton remarks.) (Those looking for a more charged, though necessarily imaginative account should read Ryszard Kapuściński’s ...”