“... of unions or management, or ideally of both. The Second World War represented a high-water mark of corporatism, with industrialists and union leaders firmly established at the apex of power. Here, then, were the people best-informed about the audit of war. Here was an unparalleled opportunity for the productive classes to assert the primacy of industry ...”

“... of the Eighties, suggest that the idea of economic management was always an illusion nearer the mark? And, whichever side is right, what would be the implications for the future – especially for the future role of government? These are grand questions which are as much political as economic. They are seldom seriously debated: instead we have sterile and ...”

“... a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their ...”

“... quite beautiful in his understated make-up, tan shirt and jeans. Shocked magenta hair was the only mark of his caste that James could identify. But both the women wore expensive gear. Black Dracula jackets and toreador pants with black puttees or black Benjamin Franklin smalls with sheer black hose and black cloth ballerina shoes made in the Republic of ...”

“... ask himself with a sudden suspicion of his intellectual cogency, “this unkind melancholy?” ’ Mark Rutherford (in The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane), the Professor in Chekhov’s ‘A Trivial Story’, Antonio in Scene One of The Merchant of Venice (where it is Antonio’s friends who attempt to persuade him that his melancholy is justified by his ...”

“... this device for well over a century. As unlimited liability was phased out, leverage among banks rose from about three or four in the middle of the 19th century to about five or six at its close. Leverage continued its upward march when extended liability was removed, and by the end of the 20th century it was higher than twenty. In 2007, at its high-water ...”

“... the precursor of modern Tokyo. Roughly 7000 people were reported dead or injured, and the numbers rose in the days that followed. There were no newspapers published in the city – the shogun’s government forbade public comment on anything directly concerning the regime – but by the end of the year hundreds of woodblock broadsheets had appeared with ...”

“... breath’; an enlarged vocabulary; a poem ‘less perfect, less stately’. Technical changes can mark a changed worldview, but here she is marvellously consistent. As she puts it in ‘Summer Night’ (2001), Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond – surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed ...”

“... its moment, explains some of its flaws as well as its significance. Polanyi wanted to make his mark on the postwar settlement, to warn of the dangers of divorcing the economy from society. But his book received little acclaim on either side of the Atlantic. His daughter, the Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, wrote in 1990 that in England, ‘where ...”

“... there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I donned washing-up gloves, picked it up by the tail and put it in the bin. I blocked all the holes I could see and hoped that would be the end of the matter. But for months afterwards I was haunted by thoughts of rats. At night, I imagined I could hear the ...”

“... Miller still had their quota of rouged youths. But at long last the IQ level of the Footlights rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter Cook, with results that Mr Hewison obviously finds it much less uncomfortable to write about, even if it simultaneously becomes more difficult to ...”

“... stuff’ – the hard-nosed modern statecraft that his daughter Indira Gandhi insisted on as the mark of a ‘mature’ country. For the rest of the population, concepts of governance were needed that were more deeply rooted in cultural realities, above all in a concept of citizenship that would seem less alien and thus offer less scope for unnecessary ...”

“... it deserves. Not much is known about the Russian Jews who fought on the Boer side, though several rose to significant rank; we find a Commandant Kaplan and a Commandant Isaac Herman, while two others, Josef Segal (‘Jackals’) and Wolf Jacobson (‘Wolf’), who acted as scouts, were legendary figures in their time; Segal became a special adviser and secret ...”

“... Zadig. Ginzburg’s Bologna colleague Umberto Eco uses the story at the start of his Name of the Rose, where the monkish detective William of Baskerville, a follower of Roger Bacon and a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes, gives a complete description of a lost horse by reading its prints in the snow. For Ginzburg and for Eamon, the techniques of conjecture ...”

“... the stick-up thatch, the all-over-the-place arms and legs. Ross’s body resembled a huge question-mark, somebody said – perhaps too neatly. Thurber found it indescribable: those arms and legs were never still. ‘He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off.’ Harpo Marx said that Ross looked like a cowboy who ...”