“... for the economic inefficiencies to which it gave rise, but also for the way in which it subjected young people to the whims of a master. Smith, Rothschild reminds us, was an enemy of privilege, who, in the sixth edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (published in 1790), inserted a passage lamenting the corrupting effects of our disposition to worship the ...”

“... at teatime; they’re also hampered by the comic Constable Bang. Only Beate Moerk, an attractive young inspector, seems to make any progress, but when she’s kidnapped by ‘the Axeman’, her colleagues respond with further inactivity. The novel is set in an imaginary, unnamed country – the kind of place where the police can squeeze a difficult witness ...”

“... An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which follows the misfortunes of Charles Hythloday, a posh young layabout, draws on Yeats’s vision of an aristocratic utopia. In Skippy Dies, which takes place at the private Seabrook College, the beleaguered history teacher, Howard, reads Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and becomes obsessed not just with the ...”

“... published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its ...”

“... the diplomatic system in 1958, when an Austrian dealer had exchanged some African big game for a young female panda which was shipped to Frankfurt. He had hoped to sell her to an American zoo, but the State Department blocked the sale on the grounds that she fell under the embargo on Chinese goods. The dealer leased her to various European zoos before London ...”

“... siblings of Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, endorse his Democratic opponent, Dr David Brill. In response, Gosar tweets: ‘Like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for his belief that neo-Nazi groups are funded by George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust ...”

“... up, about the need to escape a tsarist Russification scheme that centred on drafting eligible young Jewish men into the Army for 25-year terms of military service. I know that the Russian Government lurched between wanting to isolate Jews in a carefully demarcated Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...”

“... but pretty nasty, was a student’s claim that in Macedonia left-wing activists urged their young supporters to hide their conservative grandparents’ identity cards on election day in order to prevent them from voting. ‘That happens in Spain too,’ another student said (Spain is number 32 on the index). Earlier that summer in Norway ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country. Most of them are young, and have written one or two or three books; some, like Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, have successful careers and lives elsewhere. Their work is not part of the long 20th century; they are not a necessary component of a post-colonial efflorescence, as ...”

“... post or ‘elevated-sentry walk’. The conjecture was supported by further excavations, and the young man found himself acknowledged as a leading authority on British archaeology. He would maintain his eminence throughout his life, continuing to organise excavations and compile reports, making tens of thousands of meticulous drawings, and in the 1930s ...”

“... On the one hand: well, Semiotext(e) in the 1980s, ooh la la. Chris calls Guattari ‘Félix’; David Byrne is doing the music at Joseph Kosuth’s 50th birthday party, which gets written up the next day in the New York Post. ‘You think we’re decadent sophisticates,’ they write to Dick at one point, faux indignant, going on to explain that they’re ...”

“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”