“... is made that much more efficient. In practice, the theory ignores both irrational fashion and self-serving motives. Quite often these days employees are fired whenever their labour can plausibly be held to be expendable by executives high or low eager to show themselves ‘hard-nosed’ and thoroughly up-to-date with the latest management-consultant ...”

“... way from the marriage plot, which underwires so much literature. ‘It’s the story of life,’ Robert Sean Leonard’s character once explained on the TV show House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting ...”

“... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...”

“... says, in ‘a race to the bottom driven by ever-receding profitability’. The Nazi politician Robert Ley said that ‘there is no longer such a thing as a private individual.’ Half a century after Ley’s suicide at Nuremberg, Morgan, as editor of the News of the World, ensured that this was the case in Britain. Every parasite has its parasite. Every ...”

“... to face her in round two – but voters, especially on the left, were taken with this argument. Robert Hue, a former general secretary of the Communist Party, and Patrick Braouezec, a charismatic reformer, called on party members to vote for Macron in the first round, rather than Benoît Hamon, the winner of the PS primary, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ...”

“... and his patients included Pope, Gay, Beau Nash, Richardson, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, Robert Walpole’s adolescent daughter, Catherine (who died under Cheyne’s care of something resembling anorexia nervosa), and the Earl of Chesterfield (who passed Cheyne’s advice ineffectively on to his ‘dear boy’). Cheyne’s dietary advice was ...”

“... then. Phew.’ Phew, and indeed, gosh. He’s less passive about other things. Except for sex, the self-conscious rock and roll wild man is always ready to make his mark. When Robert Stigwood failed to pay up after a series of concerts, he got trapped on a staircase and kneed by Keith 16 times, one for each grand owed. Not ...”

“... Captain Oates’s departure from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition, but Gerald’s taciturn self-erasure seemed more appropriate to my social class and discontents than Oates’s stiff upper lip). I thought that there was nothing at all the matter with having ‘a mind of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I ...”

“... spoilt beyond redemption. The second son, the Duke of York who became the reluctant king, was the self-effacing naval officer hampered by an acute stammer. Of the younger two, Gloucester was a solid military man and Kent another playboy. More promiscuous than his elder brother, he was the good time who was had by all, including, it was said, Noël Coward and ...”

“... to have attempted. His earlier writing saw literature and power as locked in reciprocal cycles of self-construction and self-destruction, in which individuals mattered far less than ideological processes. But then he always gave Shakespeare a special place in these processes, and the circulations of power which he found ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... of some financial economists has been more clearly performative. Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton’s Nobel Prize-winning option pricing equation of 1973 – which I described two years ago as ‘the single most important breakthrough in the modern mathematical theory of finance’* – didn’t originally describe the market prices of ...”

“... be stretched to encompass an unwavering air of innocence, combined with an evident capacity for self-delusion and, when it suited him, ruthlessness. Naivety is neither good nor bad in itself, and many famous politicians have had their share of it. But unless Blair, far from being the regular guy as which he likes to project himself, is a hypocrite of ...”

“... a realist and a determined unrealist that he could seemingly invent a strange Christian sect of self-mutilated castrates and a cannibal who takes along a green companion on his journey lest he run short of food along the way, and then reveal in an afterword that such practices were well documented in the Russia of the time – which is rather like finding a ...”

“... returned from its Babylonian captivity in Avignon, Rome was a shadow of its ancient imperial self. Perhaps twenty thousand people lived in a city built for a million. Sheep grazed on the Forum, where the great dramas of the Republic had been staged, and on the hills, where warlords and emperors had built their palaces. The streets were no longer ...”