“... 6.9 per cent of income, 9-10 per cent below what used to be normal. Whatever this private deficit may portend for the future, it is certainly entirely different from anything that has ever happened before – at least in the US. The general view seems to be that private expenditure has risen because capital gains are being spent; so everything should be all ...”

“... individual effort required to produce it. If Winchester has his way, Smith’s portrait may yet appear on the £10 note, and the ‘father of English geology’ nudge Darwin off it. Smith was fortunate to have first studied the strata around Bath, where the rock succession provided a ready key to his understanding. He was also blessed with unusual ...”

“... performing their parts; but the possessed priests were genuinely beside themselves. Dog’s Dick may have started as a joke, but by the time he inhabited Father Tranquille he was as authentic as a demon can be. This is the story of Loudun. We already know it, for Aldous Huxley, writing against the background of McCarthyism, told it in The Devils of Loudun ...”

“... they have the power to sink Third World economies. Half-understood, seemingly arbitrary actions may cause untold human suffering. She has no illusions about changing the system – she isn’t in any position to do so – but she disapproves of bankers on principle, just as her bosses disapprove of the literary flourishes she injects into the speeches she ...”

“... innocuous (like the model’s fingers in the old man’s chest hair); the bull and the woman he may be abducting are both tied up, not very convincingly, with strings of flowers; a curtain comes down on the performance as a gentle shower of rain. The model still has on her Bacchic garland, and the sculptor is dreaming of his days as a wild thing. (Picasso ...”

“... to have a distinctive number of Neanderthal genes. Stringer bravely suggests who the Denisovans may have been and how the Melanesians came to have such a mixed genetic heritage. But the reality is that these are unsolved mysteries. Here is another one: how can ‘modern behaviour’, as represented by innovative stone tools and symbolic artefacts, appear in ...”

“... to stand for the same things they stand for. Their humiliation by their coalition partners on 5 May has given them reason to change tack: the mutiny of some Lib Dems in the House of Lords has led to the defeat of the police chief proposals (whipped by Clegg through the Commons) and opposition to much of the NHS legislation is now officially sanctioned by ...”

“... the session were that girlish looks need more blush, sophisticated adult looks less, though they may need more mascara. I learned that a business card, held against the temple, prevents eyeshadow overshoot. ‘Eyebrows,’ the workshop leader said, ‘are a whole other world.’ Watching her manipulate her brushes, her eyeliner applicator, I remembered how ...”

“... called madness. Prideaux writes of his paranoia, but – one neurosis not excluding another – he may also have suffered from manic depression. Periods of intense productivity rapidly succeeded others of total fallowness; amiability followed reclusiveness and misanthropy. ‘I never go anywhere. I hate human beings,’ he told Isadora Duncan. One might say ...”

“... blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer.’ At which point, you may well be wondering: and I’m reading this historical paedo-snuff because? But then you take another look at that last sentence, and notice the way it slides – undergoing, you might say, a blood-soaked transmutation – from ‘magic’ to ...”

“... venerated antiquity and suggests a promise (however empty) of social benefit. Whatever Versailles may not have been, it certainly was a public building, a stage set for the sovereign to play the spectacle of power.’ But the same could be said of the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, who aim to draw businessmen and tourists by the jet-load to witness the ...”

“... capitalist prosperity. Instead of the torch of freedom, Klein writes, ‘it seems that it may be the torch of authoritarianism that is being carried by those determined to go global.’ Both identify the chief menace of the modern world as the multinational corporations and their unelected boardrooms. Both suggest that the power and greed of these ...”

“... A fairytale, whatever messages may be inserted into it or teased out from it, is a tale of marvels. A cat struts past in boots. A demon swells out from a lamp like steam from a kettle. A princess cannot sleep because a pea below her twenty mattresses is hurting her. A prince is metamorphosed from a frog (the poet Norman MacCaig used to say it would be even better if a frog metamorphosed from a prince ...”

“... Hussein’s regime has highlighted the UN’s importance and the peculiar nature of its power. It may be a talking-shop, but it is also the repository of a legitimacy that no single nation can claim. Without this legitimacy, brute force finds it difficult to accomplish anything that is lasting. It was because the UN’s founders understood this, from their ...”

“... after their ravages. So although Chapter 8 has been excised on legal grounds, the curious reader may infer its contents from the index entries on Esther Williams, the ‘million-dollar mermaid’. These include: ‘Williams, Esther, egomania of’, ‘nauseatingly self-justifying autobiography of’ and ‘vow of revenge taken by Cheeta’. However, those ...”