“... self-described ‘rational expectations revolution’ began with the work of Friedman’s student Robert Lucas. Keynes had put expectations at the centre of macroeconomics. If you wanted to understand how an actually existing market economy worked, you had to begin with what people expected the future would look like, because those expectations determine ...”

“... for the new constitutional plans for South Africa with the gloomy conclusion that the conflict ‘may beexpected to tend gradually towards anarchy, in which the quality of life for everyone, black and white, wouldbe destroyed’. In such an event, he asks himself, would there be any relevance in the fact that Transkei was independent? Answer: scarcely ...”

“... Rise. The sinister weapons hidden in the water tower of the Bow Quarter, originally the Bryant & May Factory, he dedicated to Annie Besant, who led the match girls’ strike in 1888, and who later interested herself in Theosophy and succeeded Madame Blavatsky as the international leader of that movement. The deployment in Epping Forest, close to the base ...”

“... Roundhouse, the former engine-turning shed. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the ...”

“... dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that ...”

“... and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may be a little greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry Flanagan etching from Act – but this is still the same mouth, the same disguise. The same bite. The lights are on and there is somebody at ...”

“... Sex and death mingle in ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ when Jehane is captured with her lover Robert. She sees a ‘long bright blade without a flaw/Glide out from Godmar’s sheath’ and cut Robert’s throat, who ‘moan’d as dogs do, being half dead’. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, one of the most prolific shaggers of ...”

“... roll costs in the supermarket to how much it costs when bought in bulk: clear evidence of a scam. Robert Jenrick recently released a video of himself wandering around Stratford tube station confronting fare-dodgers (more scammers), which included a gnomic reference to streets full of ‘weird Turkish barbers’. In fact, this was a reference to another ...”

“... to the Freeze generation. The names he mentions, especially Josef Beuys and Bruce Nauman, but also Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons, certainly make sense when we look at much of the work on show in Sensation – although, naturally enough, everything that the Young British Artists (more affectionately known as YBAs) absorbed has been given a ...”

“... the reconstruction of a narrative that (in terms of cause, event and effect) is as truthful as may be. He has made full use of Froissart and many other chroniclers, but his principal sources are the records that survive: of taxation, of payments made, of musters, of appointments to command and of instructions to negotiators, together with ...”

“... preposterous contraption of regeneration, whereby at moments of dire depletion, the Doctor may collapse, shimmer a bit and re-emerge shortly afterwards, in the body and person of someone new. Audience figures were nothing special to begin with. But it turned out that the show’s young producer, Verity Lambert, had ignored her boss’s instructions ...”

“... response to the assassination in Mein Kampf: ‘I was at first seized with worry that the bullets may have been shot from the pistols of German students, who, out of indignation at the heir apparent’s continuous work of Slavisation, wanted to free the German people from this internal enemy.’ When he heard that the assassin was a Serb, ‘a light shudder ...”

“... they don’t require or want treatment, shouldn’t be given it because it does them no good and may do them harm. This isn’t what this set of patients themselves believe, and though there is little concrete evidence that the diagnosis is of benefit in cases where no intervention is required, there is also little evidence of harm, beyond the fact that the ...”

“... of being a spy or a commando, then transferred to a naval prison, where he remained until late May, when he was cleared after an investigation. A month later he boarded a ship to London with a group of eighty other French citizens. ‘The volunteer Grumbach produced a very good impression,’ his interrogator in London wrote, and issued him a Number One ...”

“... exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!Winning the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to compel ...”