“... Friedman claimed that postwar Japan and South Korea were exemplars of open, competitive markets; Francis Fukuyama credited the prewar successes of Germany and Japan to ‘economic liberalism’. It’s also true that the social question did not until recently seem as critical in Anglo-America as in late-developing nations. Britain, the first major ...”

“... could bear to swim municipally? Tomorrow we leave as the house is now sold, putting me in mind of Francis Hope’s poem about the holidays we had in rented villas back in the 1970s: Goodbye to the Villa Piranha Prepare the journey North, Smothering feet in unfamiliar socks. Sweeping the bathroom free of sand, collecting Small change of little worth. Make ...”

“... quotations or dismiss them as self-indulgent distractions or pointless jokes, which misses the mark.The postwar bebop jazzmen employed musical quotations even more often than Ellington. Charlie Parker frequently concludes fast-paced, hard-swinging numbers by stopping on a dime and gaily quoting – out of tempo, with leisurely elegance – from Percy ...”

“... novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail circuit and into print. The soundbites had plausibility because ...”

“... from the visitor visa forms I’ve looked at: Pakistan asks you to supply an ‘identification mark’, and state your blood group, religion and history of military service. Burma relies on a self-description: you must state the colour of your hair and eyes, your height and your ‘complexion’. The Democratic Republic of Congo asks that you supply ...”

“... absorbed and plotted; he interpreted the stages of the Hole’s active life as a future manifesto. Mark Morgan, an excavation theorist, biding his time on the edge of the gathering in the candlelit room, revealed that he had made a calculation, based on the value per square metre of towers going up in Hackney, and basements being hacked out, that every pint of ...”

“... of readers, Bury My Heart set the tone for nearly half a century of historiography. From Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America (1975) to Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide (2016), the subject of this scholarly outpouring has been the destruction of Native peoples at the hands of the British and US empires and their proxies. More ...”

“... reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour. Tears of joy? Relief? Despair? The book he is ...”

“... of new private homes built each year didn’t go up. It barely budged from the 150,000 a year mark. The market failed. There was increasing demand without increasing supply. Mid-boom, as the imbalance between the number of people chasing a house and the supply of new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling ...”

“... mostly self-administered. Born in Manhattan into a wealthy Irish-American business family (the Mark Cross leather goods fortune), Murphy has remained out of focus in part because she was, and continues to be, overshadowed by her splashy older brother, the sleek, sociable (and seriously good) modernist painter of the 1920s, Gerald Murphy, patron of Picasso ...”

“... responsible for her proved to be disastrous. A key recommendation arising from the report of the Francis Inquiry into the Mid-Staffs scandal, published in 2013, was that every patient be assigned a ‘responsible consultant/clinician’ and ‘named nurse’, with the names visible at the patient’s bedside; the government sent a directive to every ...”

“... And why weren’t they bringing her and Jeremiah and the others down? Zainab phoned her friend Francis who lived in the next block. ‘The firefighters are here,’ she said. ‘They have told us to stay.’ When he called her back she said Jeremiah had collapsed from the fumes. Francis was standing in the crowd below ...”

“... an executive vice president at UnitedHealth, one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the department, upped sticks in 2009 to become global head of health for the consultants KPMG. This last move did have the advantage of giving an insight into what ...”

“... in 1930, when a 38-year-old professor of Anglo-Saxon and father of four small children sat down to mark some exam scripts. On a blank page he found himself writing this: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ This is still the first sentence of the children’s classic we know.He always said he had no idea where the sentence came from, or what a ...”

“... the Lion of Kashmir was released after six years in prison. A million people lined the streets to mark his return: Nehru spoke of the necessity of ending hostilities between India and Pakistan.Kashmir troubled Nehru’s conscience. He met Abdullah in Delhi and told him that he wanted the problem of Kashmir resolved in his lifetime. He suggested that Abdullah ...”