“... with graphs and tables which make dreary reading, but furnish a post-Orwellian credibility. More enlivening are the anecdotal plums in the academic pudding. In 1917 the novelist Beatrice Harraden (herself the author of a weepily genteel bestseller, Ships that Pass in the Night) surveyed the reading of wounded Tommies and discovered that their favourite ...”

“... chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative world-making, whereas poems, even long poems, usually get us to concentrate firmly on the language and the matter in hand. Proust ...”

“... them, and they are remembered with a kindly if slightly cynical smile.’ And this, I suppose, is more or less how they are thought of now. Edith’s dark vowels still find their way into anthologies. Osbert’s plush and ponderous five-volume autobiography is always likely to be named in surveys of books that are unjustly out of print. And Sacheverell still ...”

“... rushes transformed the world economy. In half a century 435 million ounces of gold were extracted, more than the total amount in circulation over the previous three thousand years. Increased supply strengthened the British Empire and the United States, setting off what Ngai calls ‘a new stage of capital accumulation’. Engels wrote to Marx in the 1850s that ...”

“... From left to right, Paul Sethe, Marion Dönhoff, Hans Zehrer. By the mid-1920s Germany had more than four thousand daily or weekly newspapers and another three thousand more specialised periodicals. Every town and city had its own papers, and some of them, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung or the Münchner Neueste ...”

“... in recent years, the United States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so: at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The scepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals ...”

“... flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind you that it has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children ...”

“... on his condition. Every book he reviews turns out to be somehow pertinent to his lava-lump: Thomas Hardy suffered from unexplained pelvic pains too, as did Benito Mussolini. Writing an introduction to Vitaliano Brancati’s Il bell’Antonio, a novel about a gorgeous young man whose impotence has something to do with Italy’s descent into ...”

“... to wrest the detective story away from the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett. An explanation of sorts had already been offered by George Orwell. In ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946), he meditated on the apparent passing of the homely crime of murder as it was commonly ...”

“... took shape. This was a society of intimate relations between patrons and clients. Few were more able, or indeed luckier, than Wren. While his uncle was in the Tower for recalcitrant royalism, the young scholar nevertheless got support from several of Cromwell’s kinsmen. The Lord Protector burst into one dinner to offer a deal for the prisoner’s ...”

“... he also has an advantage: his particular knowledge of her life. King worked with Bainbridge for more than twenty years. He looked after her admin and edited her last novel for publication after her death. Diaries, letters and lovers have been open to him. He is in an ideal position to evoke as well as analyse. What he has actually done is annotate and ...”

“... two decades running against the legacy of the three-term mayor, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Thomas Piketty’s unexpected blockbuster made talk of class conflict safe for polite company, while trend pieces heralded ‘the new socialist wunderkinds of America’ gathered around magazines like the New Inquiry (several of its editors were arrested during ...”

“... from their own individual experiences. Widespread anxiety produces phenomena unthinkable in more prosperous times: for example, Thomas Piketty’s seven hundred-page volume of economic theory, Capital in the 21st Century, joining the bestseller lists. During crises of capitalism in the 20th century, the equivalent ...”

“... now has a government educational scheme named after him, was not only obscure but disgraced for more than a quarter-century after his death. Hinton isn’t of Turing’s calibre, and Blacklock doesn’t oversell him as a pioneer, though he quotes encomia by Borges and Iain Sinclair. Hinton published an essay called ‘What Is the Fourth Dimension?’ a few ...”

“... to Hitch: in spite of his exhaustive and fascinating new research, Spoto is often unable to offer more than a jaundiced paraphrase of Taylor’s accounts (he mentions Hitch only once in the text and twice in the notes). When his versions of events differ from Taylor’s he usually looks on the dark side: in particular, the disgusted way he writes of the last ...”