“... about giants brought him to think happily about his own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ...”

“... him as ‘a good painter, arguably the nearest to a great one to have emerged in Britain since the war’. And greatness is, Bacon says, the only thing worth attempting: ‘You see art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself ... what is fascinating now is that it is going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must ...”

“... Where sociologists had spent much of the 20th century trying to understand poverty and shifting class stratifications across the spectrum, Piketty focused on a small group of super-rich individuals, and posed a deceptively simple empirical question: where had they got all their money from? That so much of it turned out to be ‘unearned’ (either inherited ...”

“... the past ten years or so. That they had done so was linked to the rise of a ‘new Muslim middle class’ in Indonesia during the 1980s, as prejudice against anyone thought to be Arab became fainter. As Islamic modernism or conservatism of various kinds became more evident and the public presentation of oneself as a pious middle-...”

“... that fail to establish any kind of sustainable mastery. They appeared to Freud first as part of ‘war neurosis’ and were set apart from forms of neurosis organised by wish-fulfilment. These forms of compulsive repetition were not in search of gratification: they were unwanted repetitions that wore down the ego. Derrida is frank: ‘At issue is a diagnosis ...”

“... world-reshaping times. Cicero was a ‘new man’ from nowhere, by birth a member of the second class of Rome’s elite, the ‘equestrian order’, although by this time Rome’s ‘knights’ knew far more about mining concessions and tax-farming than they did about how to handle a horse. The class above, the senatorial ...”

“... the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the years of the ‘war on terror’ declared by an American administration that sees (or saw) itself as world-mastering. And our reading in 2006 is in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the invasion of Iraq, acute US-Iranian tensions, the ...”

“... my exam results had been based on coursework. I was a good examinee, but not much of a stayer in class. I needed an occasion before I could perform and even put on my suit for A levels (or the Higher School Certificate as it was then). It was the same at university, and I was shown my college’s assessment of me a few years ago (the records are kept in the ...”

“... shared Islamophobic and homophobic posts on social media. His background is stolidly upper-middle-class: childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from ...”

“... Esmond Warner, known as ‘Plum’ after his father the cricketer, came back at long last from the war, my mother was already in London. She had arrived a few months before from Bari, her home town in southern Italy, flying in on one of the first passenger flights to land in the newly demilitarised airport at Heathrow, and making her own way with her small ...”

“... well as her Jewish origins, and had died in a concentration camp. In fact both women survived the war, with Cahun dying in 1954, Moore in 1972. That Cahun expressed herself in a number of genres is one reason for this neglect but it’s also true that those who resist the prevailing categories can hardly be surprised to fall through the cracks when the ...”

“... of his Stalin book. Part of the reason is that he has lately been much occupied with the ‘war’ on Islamist terrorism, and seems, publicly, to have been thinking about little else. Earlier this year, to an interviewer from the Times, he said: ‘They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 ...”

“... periods of desperate re-adjustment. He can give harrowingly vivid descriptions of the squalor that war had brought to many of the towns and cities he knew, but his accounts of governmental politics tend to be cursory. His attention is caught by people. He may not explore their minds and hearts but he sees the full surface. Back in England he soon assembled and ...”

“... say, the rediscovery of the real crowds of the Third Republic (through analysing, perhaps, the class, gender or age of those who congregated at certain demonstrations, gathered appreciatively around Boulanger, or intervened in the Dreyfus affair), to a particular writing of the crowd – for instance, the crowd as a complex metaphor and motif stretching ...”

“... but have been affected by them’. Maybe not. And quite likely reminiscing about the Civil War would have been ‘contra-indicated’ after 1660. But people can be stubbornly resistant to mere proximity, however much scholars like to forge connections. It is striking to note, for instance – to take an example from Anne Hudson’s book – that ...”