“... traditional theology, virtue is a matter of energy and enjoyment, and evil mere deprivation. Evil may make a lot of noise, but the dust and heat it raises derive from an incapacity for life, which is why nobody could actually be in hell. To be damned must mean to be dead. All this, however, is bound to look different when the middle classes are in the ...”

“... legitimate the witch-hunts of all recent governments against ‘lazy’ academics. I rather hope David Blunkett never reads The Dons. But were dons, as a group, ever, even a hundred years ago, as Annan paints them? I doubt it. Annan wittily recounts a whole series of myths of the eccentric ‘college man’ of the early to mid-20th century. These stories, to ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”

“... an ageing widower. His wife Nadia, once the beautiful young girl, has died of cancer. Their son, David-Rico, has taken off to India-Nepal-Thailand, as all young Israelis do, if you believe the fuss, as Oz seems to, about ‘migration’ in the Israeli media. The son’s girlfriend, Dita, lives in Tel Aviv, in a district frequented (if you believe the fuss in ...”

“... book can readily be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early antecedents, and in the case of Seabiscuit there are many to account for, from Charles ...”

“... baronage. Smith should not be aligned too closely with critics of the Ancien Régime. Like David Hume, he admired the way modern European monarchies, such as France, protected personal freedoms. When outlining the complex patchwork of taxes which ‘oppressed’ the subjects of the French monarchy, he felt compelled to point out that France was ...”

“... seems reserved, in the film, for her son. In 1962, what happened to Raymond Shaw and his men may have seemed fantastic, but perhaps no more so than the news that had emerged five years earlier that American POWs in Korea had made false confessions, and, shockingly, that some had decided against repatriation. As a 1957 New York Times story put it: ‘For ...”

“... and despite the Union leadership’s attempt to calm the atmosphere, the press made much of it. It may have struck the administration that it was beginning to look like the weaker partner in this careful rapprochement with Islam; in any case, by the summer, with public thinking about the veil taking another ungenerous turn, Chirac moved to set up the ...”

“... with capitalism might reflect on the value of his radical reformism: the capitalist apocalypse may not be just around the ...”

“... On​ 13 May 1397, the visitors came to Ruardean in Gloucestershire. They learned that Nicholas Cuthler was causing a scandal among his neighbours. He had not come to terms with his father’s death and was making strange claims: he went about in public saying that his father’s spirit still walked the village at night ...”

“... them Kempe, the 12th-century poet Marie de France and the sublime Julian of Norwich – others may lurk behind the anonymous female-voiced lyrics in Old and Middle English. Wellesley devotes a few intriguing pages to a 15th-century Welsh-language poet, Gwerful Mechain, whose diverse oeuvre ranges from religious verses to an ‘Ode to the Vagina’ and a ...”

“... It made​ perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it ...”

“... to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in ...”

“... that the world does not give us everything we deserve, but warning that any attempt to change it may rob us of what little we have.Mises was not a conservative, however. He was a radical liberal, as he explained at length in 1922 in Die Gemeinwirtschaft (‘The Collective Economy’, translated as Socialism). The book was intended as a refutation of Marxism ...”

“... and fiction. Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”