“... the current business customs of English-speakers, is a cloudy concept; but most authorities follow Joseph Schumpeter in seeing credit creation by, or through, a banking system as its distinctive feature. Historical experience suggests that pioneering, credit-based capitalism is effective on frontiers, before competitors have arrived and whittled profits below ...”

“... Chadwick’s dictum and eventually spurred one of the great feats of Victorian engineering – Joseph Bazalgette’s vast metropolitan sewer system.The germ theory of disease that gained currency in the last decades of the 19th century provided a new vocabulary for talking about the risks of foul water, but new concepts reinforced old sensibilities. In the ...”

“... planning, with a particular emphasis on shrinking the extraordinary consumption of the global north via economic restructuring and domestic and international redistribution.Any such plan must envision a rapid and highly co-ordinated global programme of decommissioning. Our current growth-oriented regime has put most of the power and resources in very few ...”

“... subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two months later, in Thermidor, the politically nimble Barère voted to condemn Robespierre to death, but that is another story). He called ...”

“... advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets.’ Once he made it to the big leagues via his adventures with Argus, Black began to expand his portfolio of ...”

“... thee an ark of gopher wood.’ But nobody knows what gopher wood is. The Ark Encounter is made of North American timber – Engelmann spruce, Douglas fir – and radiata pine from New Zealand. More important, is a wooden vessel of this scale viable? The largest wooden ship ever built, the schooner Wyoming, was 450 feet long on completion in 1909. When its ...”

“... and it was only in 1996 that a group of doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Joseph Biederman and Janet Wozniak, first proposed that some children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder might in fact suffer from bipolar disorder. But whoever googles ‘bipolar disorder’ today is likely to learn that the illness has ...”

“... in hospital. He booked himself into a psychiatric treatment-and-research department in the north of Moscow. I realised Alexey was in a hospital ward when I saw the photos he was posting on Facebook: ‘Welcome to my new home,’ he joked. It seemed fitting that my Facebook feed was filling up with posts from a mental institution. As the conflict over ...”

“... had budgeted for a back-cover image, I would have recommended an empty lawn on the fringes of North London: the site of the gargantuan Romanesque abbey church at Waltham Holy Cross, whose admittedly stately parish church abutting on the west end of the lawn is often mistaken by casual visitors for part of that lost building.3 The monastery was closed and ...”

“... a reassuring feeling of continuity and survival. Now, blocking the view of the vast horizon to the north, there will be that silly bridge carrying more cars to a gigantic third airport. Little of Istanbul – the Istanbul of high-rises, unfinished corporate spires, highways and bare street life that stretches across an area nearly four times the size of London ...”

“... is also ‘a state of controlled panic’). Privation fuels the eye’s predations, and when Joseph Summers described Marianne Moore’s meticulous attention as a ‘method of escaping intolerable pain’, Bishop wrote to him to say that she was just beginning to realise this about herself. Yet while the cultivation of impressions might be an enabling ...”

“... voyage to Australia, beckoned by the National Gallery of Victoria, which he had advised, and by Joseph Burke of Melbourne University, who believed that Clark would stimulate cultural interests in his compatriots. Clark wrote a contrite and affectionate note to his first wife, Jane, assuring her that there would be no more ‘silly fits’. This curious ...”

“... de Saint-Mémin, a local aristocrat who, having earned his living making profile portraits in North America, was appointed director of the city’s art academy by the restored Bourbons. Although now incorporated within a much larger museum complex, it may claim to be the earliest, as well as the most spectacular, surviving museum devoted to the art of the ...”

“... brighter gold on the altar it shelters. The arrangements on the outer walls of the chapels in the north aisle, completed more than twenty years later, are no less distinguished. In two of these chapels, spectacular monolithic columns, one of pavonazzo marble (white, with exquisite purple veins), the other of fior di persico (resembling damson mixed with ...”

“... an extra 3d for Poets’ Corner and the nave, and an extra shilling for the royal tombs and north transept. These days it’ll cost you £25, plus another £4.50 for the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Galleries (worth it, in my opinion, for the effigy of Nelson and another from 1686 of Charles II in one of his own outfits). This makes it, by my ...”