“... to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to ...”

“... of US debt. The deal on offer to the Republicans was described by the conservative commentator David Brooks as ‘the deal of the century’, offering ‘trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases’: A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth ...”

“... birthday: ‘A ranking of New York writers came out on the internet. You were ranked thirty, and David Remnick was eight positions ahead of you. Philip Gourevitch was ranked number eleven. They are both ahead of you.’ Nina, pulling her son aside during the same dinner: ‘It seems like you don’t really know me.’ Semyon, again to Shteyngart’s ...”

“... rocce sopra il Tajmyr.’ If Vostyach seems a less convincing idea in English than in Italian it may partly be that cultural predispositions are to blame. Marani’s Vostyachs ‘had found the passage towards another world in the darkness of the forests and had never wanted to turn back’ (‘nel buio delle foreste avevano trovato il passaggio verso un ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any ...”

“... by Apollo 11’s commander). Apollo 11’s commander, Neil Armstrong, took saying less to what we may as well call cosmic extremes. He went silent, became absent, allegedly working but never seen, the J.D. Salinger of the US space programme. The race for the Moon was fuelled by a terrifying combustion of scientific know-how and political paranoia. But the ...”

“... Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and performance has become increasingly blurred: during the US presidential debates, a soi-disant ...”

“... himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, David Manning; the overcoated figure bursting into our meeting was Jack Straw. He wanted to tell Manning that he had persuaded Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, to add Hamas to the EU list of terrorist movements. His tale of his conversion of Fischer ...”

“... who’d helped plan the bombing campaign – notably an ambitious lieutenant colonel called David Deptula – saw the victory as proof of the virtues of what they called ‘Effects Based Operations’. Advances in technology, they reported, meant that the US could locate strategic targets and destroy them with absolute precision. It was now ...”

“... clinic was notorious for cruelly ingenious contrivances to control and ‘cure’ the insane. By May the following year, Autenrieth, having concluded that Hölderlin’s illness was incurable, and assuming that he had at most three years to live, released him into the care of Ernst Zimmer, a local carpenter. Zimmer inhabited what had been part of the old ...”

“... the French Ambassador. The patriotic hero, it turned out, had venally conspired with foreigners. David Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places ...”

“... was ‘an amateur artist who, on vacations, used to paint funny faces on tennis balls’. Marvin may have suggested the packet colour: pink. It was instantly popular: ‘Packets were swiped from restaurants and stolen from hospitals,’ Cohen says. A&P, the supermarket chain, came calling, and pretty soon every diner in America offered Sweet’N Low ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar British science (Backroom Boys, 2003) and a non-fiction novel that unpacks the story of Soviet economics (Red ...”

“... departed the gold standard in 1931: ‘They never told us we could do that!’The situation may be so dire that conformism of any kind is implausible. Whitehall has drawn up a list of potential ‘black swan’ events that could upend the new government in its first year; many of them seem unsurprising, even likely: the collapse of the prison ...”