“... as Geneva – familiarised by British tipplers as ‘gin’ – was introduced by the Court of William of Orange in the 1690s. By the mid-18th century, a quarter of London’s population – almost exclusively from the poorer classes – had a gin habit averaging a pint a day. A survey of 1750 shows that every fourth house in the parish of St Giles was a ...”

“... oppressive monarchy, leading to the development of liberty for the individual under the law, and cash rather than service as the basis of transactions. At the same time the economic resources of the aristocracy encouraged the development of skilled manufacturing work, and hence prosperity for many sections of society. It all sounds fine provided you remember ...”

“... finding a place for transcendent values, must be the pursuit of English novelists.’ It is William Golding who comes top here: he has ‘wed his sense of a transcendent evil and good to the fully felt social novel that the English have constructed in their great tradition’. Few people will dissent, I imagine, from this rating of Mr Golding. It must ...”

“... but the retention of that power is probably the most indispensable element of success.’ Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, stated the contrary view a month later: ‘The attitude of some ministers is rather to find out what is the smallest amount of money and the smallest number of men with which we may hope, some day, to win ...”

“... power-base was in Lancashire, a part of England famous for clinging to Catholicism. His cousin Sir William Stanley was a notorious traitor, who after years of stalwart military service to Elizabeth had handed the Dutch town of Deventer over to the Spanish and formed a regiment in the King of Spain’s service. Lord Strange was a problem for the Government. As ...”

“... to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book agreement. Inside, the op-ed page was dominated by a gloating ‘Good Riddance to the Net ...”

“... the endless gadgets, and the need to clean them or tidy them away. We had come a long way from William Morris’s thinking on household objects, that one should keep nothing that is neither useful nor beautiful, and our house, in the middle of our street, was testament to the ugliness of half-arsed consumption, a Bedlam of miniature wants. Storage ...”

“... things of value to Microsoft. Money is off the table because Smith doesn’t believe that ‘cash exchange for community support’ helps. ‘There are numerous social benefits that amply incentivise contributions to communities,’ he explains. Money isn’t one; indeed, money would probably be harmful. To people with a certain view of human ...”

“... colourful local characters the narrator meets along the way. This is true of Steinbeck, Kerouac, William Least Heat-Moon in his Blue Highways and so on. Even the insufferable Henry Miller, in his 1945 volume The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, has his unrelieved bombast interrupted by a mechanic in Albuquerque called Dutter. The Maestro and I weren’t doing ...”

“... insistence on being provided with lavish perks, left a bad taste, as did the disappearance of cash donated by the American public. When she got back to China, Chiang was fuming with jealousy: why had she met Roosevelt at the White House? There were rumours that he was having an affair with his nurse, that Meiling found a pair of high-heeled shoes under ...”

“... is, of complicating doctrine or confusing theory. Nor does AA have any money; it accumulates no cash, capital or material assets. There are good reasons for this austerity. Alcoholics (whether practising or recovering) are hopeless with money, you might as well give them whisky. Those groups which collect funds to set up their own premises or accumulate ...”

“... I was a student, fought hard against racial segregation. Today, its vice-chancellor, Malegaparu William Makgoba, compares white males to superannuated apes, creatures who have for ever lost their place in the evolutionary tree. The only salvation for them, he says, is to learn to sing, dance, eat, dress and in every other way behave as Africans; only then ...”

“... he is an old hand at the game. On an earlier exit, he has smuggled out three million roubles in cash for the Swedish Comintern. Iroida stays in Russia. She joins the Cheka and in 1926 is promoted to deputy director of the Moscow region forced labour camp. She continues at this exacting post in a busy part of the Gulag until the early 1930s. We must not ...”

“... The purchasers did not have to put any money down, and could pay over five years, in cotton or cash as they saw fit. It remains unclear exactly why Cameron sold the land to blacks – not a common practice in the postwar South – and offered such lenient terms. Land values had plummeted because of the depression and white buyers were difficult to ...”

“... ditched, the elite blended imperceptibly with the masses. Moreover, as Marx recognised, and as William Reddy elaborated in Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (1987), by legislating that feudal rights could be redeemed through cash compensation, the revolutionaries consecrated money as the universal equaliser. The ...”