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“... the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the libido, the unconscious and the uncanny ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... and cosy corner-shop atmosphere: exterminate and replace them. The mastermind behind Crown was Robert Haft, a Harvard Business School graduate who had written his master’s thesis on retail discounting. Crown’s philosophy, as displayed on South Lake, was predatory. Find an existing profitable outlet, set up alongside it, discount the neighbour into ...”

“... and shaped’ by the pressures of their milieu; their careers ‘lose the linear and self-propelled trajectory assumed by biography’, and as only a handful can ‘impose themselves sufficiently and for long enough to affect the course and character of a political system, so only a few deserve more biographical attention than can be supplied by ...”

“... 97 per cent of our genome is ‘genetic junk’, a palimpsest of useless DNA from ancient viruses, self-replicating remnants of genes no longer functional, and ‘jumping genes’ that spread regardless of the welfare of their carriers. As Ridley observes, ‘our genomes badly need worming.’ There are further intriguing lessons about genetic conflict ...”

“... meet, rather than people. In white-collar epics from King Vidor’s seminal The Crowd through Robert Wise’s highly inventive Executive Suite and the exuberant Jerry Lewis vehicle The Errand Boy to The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen brothers’ screwball version of Frank Capra, what separates the upper floors from the lower is access to information. The ...”

“... and strait-laced brother Walter. He now immersed himself in British and American literature: Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, above all Kipling. He became the leading figure in a bohemian gang who wrote and sang songs together, drank, chased girls and shocked respectable burghers. He narrowly avoided being expelled from school: a teacher argued in his ...”

“... or indeed literary ones; I took vicarious pride in knowing that it had been the regiment of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and David Jones. They had no successors in my time. In Jamaica the officers lived a cheerfully philistine life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending weekends on the beaches of the north coast. The other ranks took ...”

“... his stares and his silences: a skill he had honed in college, modelling himself on his classmate Robert Friedland, who transferred to Reed from Bowdoin in Maine after being caught with 24,000 tabs of LSD and sentenced to two years in prison. For a few years Jobs, who was already meditating and taking hallucinogens, ‘treated him almost like a ...”

“... Victor Gollancz or Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman, or an actual mass organisation like Lord Robert Cecil’s League of Nations Union or Canon Sheppard’s pacifist Peace Pledge Union, they had the word, but little else. As in the 19th century they had a good chance of being talked about and influencing politics and administration within the enclosure of ...”

“... instance, by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, antiquarian, forger, embezzler and (as Johns writes) a ‘self-deluding impostor of extraordinary proportions’. Brydges spent much of his life composing unremarkable sonnets (about 2000 a year as he got older) while trying to prove (on extremely slight grounds) his right to the title Baron Chandos of Sudeley. The rest ...”

“... lowest public profile. (How many spy novels can you think of that feature ‘sigint’, aside from Robert Harris’s Enigma?) Yet today it is probably the most important, and certainly the most expensive. It is housed in Cheltenham in ‘the largest building ever initiated by the British government’. The building is shaped like a doughnut, which is the ...”

“... The Ratliff stuff, which teeters between dark comedy and a more sympathetic depiction of redneck self-contempt, seems to belong in a novel by a figure like Barry Hannah, who briefly taught Tartt at the University of Mississippi, though it’s done without Hannah’s flair for loopy satire. Harriet, on the other hand, is decked out with tropes from ...”

“... the Enlightenment as described by historians such as Cassirer, Gay, Daniel Mornet, Franco Venturi, Robert Darnton, John Marshall (and myself) – dissolves in Israel’s dialectical thinking. Israel sees two Enlightenments, one radical and good, the other moderate and of mixed value at best. Born and educated in Britain, now teaching in the United States, he ...”

“... attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few ...”