“... of West Africa, the Philippines, and regions of India and Japan. It was the most powerful and by far the richest empire the world had ever seen. ‘How strange a thing it is,’ one English observer reflected in 1609, ‘that all the states of Europe have been asleep so long that for a hundred years and more the wealth of riches of the East and West ...”

“... that the man on the line was trying to patch up his marriage, and the task wasn’t going to be quick or easy. ‘You just aren’t going to let us get back together, are you?’ he said in a tone at once supplicating and truculent. I thought that maybe she had her reasons and wondered how far away she was on the other end of the line. At Lee ...”

“... number of the literary critics dwelled on the fear of tyranny that was voiced in (and around) 1614 by poets and historians, an anxiety given focus by the breakdown of the short-lived Parliament that was called in the spring and by the imprisonment of the Crown’s principal critics within ...”

“... intimidating dance, performed before each game in front of the opposition, and sometimes met by an unconvincing couldn’t-care-less huddle. In the event the French faced it out. The ‘haka’, Twickenham, 1954 The New Zealanders handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in ...”

“... Richardson’s William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book ...”

“... Woolf thought of Milton as the ‘first of the masculinists’, a judgment since echoed by many. Eliot blamed him for the ‘dissociation of sensibility’; Pound deplored ‘his asinine bigotry, his beastly hebraism, the coarseness of his mentality’. More widespread these days is the belief, common among those who encounter Milton as required ...”

“... in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I ...”

“... idea being that if more power was given to the proles, the nation’s lampposts would immediately be festooned with lynched paedophiles. And the answer to that, in turn, is: ‘What about Iraq?’ A system without a democratic deficit would never have gone to war, and would certainly not have gone to war with the two main political ...”

“... a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as ...”

“... they watched Moshe marching with his fellow trade unionists on Labour Day. Tzipke was terrified by the sight of mounted police: ‘It’s the Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!’ But Golda was struck by the fact that the ‘police on horseback were escorting the marchers instead of dispersing them and trampling them ...”

“... my head. The wedding invitation had urged us to wear modest clothing because the Eucharist would be present. It was for the Eucharist, then, that I was wrestling a thick anti-intercourse pair of tights up towards my waist. ‘I had a lot of imagination and I entrapped you. You should be eternally grateful I didn’t give ...”

“... day and raining still, as it has been for the last week. Around four it eases off and we walk up by the lake. The waterfall at the top of the village is tumultuous, though the torrent has never been as powerful as it was in 1967 when (perhaps melodramatically) I envisaged the lake dam breaking and engulfing the whole village. The lake itself is always black ...”

“... Myth​ is a story that can be retold by anyone, with infinite variation, and still be recognisable as itself. The outline of surviving myth is re-recognised in the lives of each generation. It’s an instrument by which people simplify, rationalise and retell social complexities ...”

“... what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel ...”

“... 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society’. This was the ‘epochal’ shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, the late capitalist ...”