“... Well, he has always been envious of Eliot, and if The Old Man’s Road is no 4 Quartets it may be, in a nasty sort of way, his Ash Wednesday (why should the aged beagle stretch its legs, he yawned, scratching himself with his singing bone) … The poems are probably also the expression of a periodic self-disgust (another instance is the kind of ...”

“... which Darcy’s interrogators put to him in 14 different ways. But Hoyle suspects that the badges may have been prepared against an abortive rebellion planned for 1534, and there is in fact little or no hard evidence of high-level conspiracy in 1536. Of course Hoyle is not uniquely immune from what he calls the disposition of historians to see the past ...”

“... is not and has never been humanly feasible.’ ‘At home – chez soi – one is a potentate; one may grant an outsider relief from the outside; and this must be what I yearn for.’ ‘I think that what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with.’ Plus, despite his failure to reproduce with Jenn, ‘I have always wanted ...”

“... of them and of all dominion and authority into the hands of the foreign foe.’ Al-Afghani may have been exaggerating. But he knew from his experiences in India and Egypt how quickly the West’s seemingly innocuous traders and bankers could turn into diplomats and soldiers. The feckless shah had already compromised Iran’s relative immunity to ...”

“... Back​ in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...”

“... collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other’ – postwar writers found an apt description of social life as a whole. When Betty Friedan ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... real luxuries, offered only to a select and well-paid few, were priced absurdly low.) Prokofiev may later have regretted this decision: good apartments were in very short supply in Moscow, and he never got one he really liked. Now came the challenge of becoming a Soviet composer. Apolitical as he was, Prokofiev nevertheless seems genuinely to have welcomed ...”

“... so that we can learn lessons’.* It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking the moment when the UK fell off its global perch, trust in government collapsed and the country turned inward and began to disintegrate. When the report was published I was outside the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the shadow of ...”

“... journals have to be printed and distributed. Peer reviewers and the editorial boards of journals may not be paid, but designers, typesetters and copy editors are. Elsevier, the world’s biggest publisher of journals, employs 16,000 editors. Still, no matter how generously you spin it, the numbers tell their own story: in 2015, Elsevier reported profits of ...”

“... to a caravan progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but mobility and prosperity are best kept distinct.There are deeper disagreements over how to understand and measure the ‘social positions’ that people are – or aren’t – moving between. All mobility research is ...”

“... a months-long curfew. McKinsey’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, recently said that we may be living in ‘India’s century’. Praising Modi for ‘implementing policies that have modernised India and supported its growth’, the economist and consultant Nouriel Roubini described the country as a ‘vibrant democracy’. But it is becoming harder ...”

“... conservative Hard SF writers of the 1980s, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.‘Extrapolation’ may be a purer ideal. The term is imported from mathematics: a writer, keenly observing the world around them, can measure its trends and implications, then offer persuasive suppositions about what comes next. Yet, like multi-tasking or Tantric sex, extrapolation ...”

“... I do not.’ Five days later, ‘there are accounts of the Hitler regime cracking.’ Then, on 5 May 1940, ‘I prophesy that [Chamberlain] will weather this storm.’Channon’s mutterings seem to confirm the view that many members of the English upper class were appeasers and defeatists, if not crypto-Nazis, as does Nicolson’s comment in ...”

“... the language question has been seen by compatriots as a measure of his Scottish patriotism: but it may well be more significant of his attitude to class. Not only nationality but also, and perhaps more especially, class were at issue in the choice he faced between Scots and English, and were expressed in the accommodations he reached between the two in forming ...”