“... by Goubert, and this is all the more unfortunate in view of the fact that some of the best, like Richard Evans’s prize-winning Death in Hamburg, are not concerned with Britain at all. The literature of cholera is now abundant. Nor has typhoid been completely neglected. On more topical themes there is little in Goubert that will be of help in relation to ...”

“... with clear maps, an increasing rarity in these cost-conscious days, and its remarkably low price makes it almost a loss leader to entice one to buy the subsequent volumes. Yet one is forced to ask whether another book of this kind supplies any great need. Mr Pitt has little to say which is new or which demands the revision of previous judgments on the ...”

“... chosen range. Is it the fear of spreading too widely? Among living writers she does not mention Richard Altick, Raymond Williams or Anthony Smith. Nor does she speculate about newspapers and books, which co-existed easily or sometimes uneasily on W.H. Smith bookstalls, although she has a brief and useful section on periodicals which steadfastly dealt in ...”

“... Parliamentary footwork had ensured that the Bill progressed through its committee stage, but at a price: it would not apply in Scotland (largely because of the opposition of the Secretary of State, Willie Ross), Northern Ireland or the Armed Forces; and the age of consent was fixed at 21. Richard Crossman, who was then ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. It takes money to provide the exuberant childhood that Wordsworth celebrates in his ‘Immortality Ode’: glorious in the might Of untamed pleasures That factory boys and young mill-hands should be denied this was bad ...”

“... at Nasa had claimed the programme would have a success rate of 99.999 per cent. Petroski cites Richard Feynman, who, observing that this implied the space agency ‘could put up a shuttle each day for three hundred years expecting to lose only one’, asked: ‘What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?’ It wasn’t shared by ...”

“... Cohen considers the idea of ‘market socialism’: a system that would still be based on the price mechanism but would prevent the concentration of capital that produces the gross inequalities of the capitalist market. On balance, this would, for him, be better than nothing. It is ‘the genius of the market that it recruits low-grade motives to ...”

“... also to have his children brought into the world with teeth, after the manner of Richard III’. Bowes seems not to have minded claiming the child (‘a small price to pay’, Moore decides, ‘for the spectacular fortune he now possessed’). The other children were sent away to various schools. He obliged ...”

“... to Darling. In 1972 Vogue ran a full-page portrait of Darling, Curtis and Holly Woodlawn by Richard Avedon. Darling held a heart-shaped lollipop emblazoned with the words LOVE ME. The high point of her career came when she was cast in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings. Williams thought Darling was ‘marvellous to work with … a disciplined ...”

“... wax harvested from sperm whales were of much better quality but cost twice as much. In the 1850s, Price’s Patent Candle Company (PPCC) found a way to make palm oil candles that were white and didn’t smell, even when the raw oil was rancid. The candles were named Belmont Sperm – a link to the expensive spermaceti candles, though palm oil was even cheaper ...”

“... say a weapon: chicanery.’ And: ‘Smiles are rare in ancient art. Tranquillity was bought at the price of tension and renunciation – hallmarks of the ancient world as much as of the world of the samurai or of Queen Victoria.’ And: ‘The puritanism of the upper class did not rest on sexuality: it rested on sexuality as a possible source of moral ...”

“... city – had been razed and looted by the British because its chief, Nana Olomu, objected to the price they had offered for his palm oil. Nana was forced into exile, just as King Jaja of Opobo had been in the 1880s. Jaja, a former slave, had developed a network of palm oil trading houses along the River Niger but in a fit of overconfidence he had attempted ...”

“... and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints. It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of ...”

“... mural and inadvertently reveals his defection plan to his assistant Max by offering him a bargain price on his Wartburg. Max tries to dissuade him: ‘Kurt, in the West they don’t even do painting anymore. These days painting is considered bourgeois.’ To which Kurt replies: ‘I thought for them “bourgeois” was good?’ Even if your art exhibits ...”