“... day. Civilisation doesn’t eliminate human impulses: it tames them, through changing their means of expression. That, I decided straight away, would have to be the serious story under the paragraphs that tied the clips together: otherwise the commentary would be doomed never to rise above the level of condescension. Strong anecdote potential, a flash ...”

“... that drinking is the other half of life: it’s more fundamental than that. It’s what Nietzsche means when he discusses the ascetic ideals: the ideals of self-denial destroy creativity, power, even sex. These are the ‘last men’, the nihilists, the hopeless ones: Vladimir and Estragon without their sense of irony. They read the 12 Traditions, they say ...”

“... sinister ones. Sent to bed while one of his older cousins read aloud from the first instalment of David Copperfield, he managed to hide himself and listen breathlessly – only to give the game away when he burst into loud sobs of sympathy ‘under the strain of the Murdstones’. The small James surrendered with equal readiness to the magic of the ...”

“... afford to purchase all the journals their researchers need, what hope do the rest of us have?’ David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK, asked the Guardian. When Swartz was 21, he and three other unidentified authors wrote the ‘Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto’, the text of which is included in The Boy Who Could Change the World. It ...”

“... much time in the city of Cluj, where she had formed a passionate friendship with the historian David Prodan. The Securitate meanwhile had decided that with a name like Verdery she must be an ethnic Hungarian (quite wrong: the family roots were French), and therefore had been planted to encourage subversion among the disaffected Magyar minority in ...”

“... off as a ‘dull’ decade, repeating the clichéd and inaccurate suggestion that until Elizabeth David published her Book of Mediterranean Food no British person had used olive oil except as a cure for earache. Craxton, however, found England both dull and cold and from now on spent as much time as he could in Greece, where he faced the ‘unending ...”

“... the government put de Kooning’s Woman III up for sale. It was sold to the American billionaire David Geffen, and the proceeds were used to buy pages of the Houghton Shahnameh, a particularly magnificent edition of the Persian Book of Kings, that had been taken apart and sold as single leaves by a collector in the 1970s. The purchase satisfied nobody. Some ...”

“... so nationalism has long offered individuals something to identify with, to feel internally, as a means of rebelling against the empty proceduralism and technocracy of the liberal state. The state can know whether or not I am legally a ‘UK citizen’, but only I can know if I feel British.Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford’s Brexitland is a sweeping and ...”

“... to Immortality …’The man appointed as the university’s president, an ichthyologist called David Starr Jordan, was a surprising choice. He was, on the face of it, as rational and progressive as Jane was mystical and reactionary. He had spent his career promoting the liberal agenda of the time – which included eugenics along with pacifism and ...”

“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”

“... sex can be an immigrant’s passport to provisional acceptance within the majority culture – a means of transcending racial and class barriers. His male characters enter ritzy Knightsbridge clubs on the arm of well-to-do white women. But there are still pitfalls: one of Moses’s Jamaican friends is treated like a possession by a wealthy Chelsea resident ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a pupil of David, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist. The woman’s breast is exposed, but not with any sly or coy intention – her undress seems as natural to her as her white cotton turban; and the candour of her gaze is as disarming as the dignity of her bearing is ...”

“... that is, stirs up and excites – the postponement of the composite object ‘them’ means that the verb attains an absolute or intransitive force. This last is a common device in Pope. The total effect of this degree of interplay is to indicate that madness and poverty are very near allied. In Pope’s world of the Dunces, the Bedlamite and the ...”

“... which had two interdependent components. The first was monetarism. Lawson is not afraid to quote David Hume in asserting the fundamental relation between the quantity of money in circulation and the level of prices in the economy as a whole. He tells us that he was converted by the accelerating rate of price increases in the late Sixties and early Seventies ...”