“... all his brothers in holy orders, his two sisters nuns. As was common for members of his patrician class, he was sent to the local Jesuit college in Como, but then rapidly strayed into the paths of enlightened philosophy and poetics. The promised land of Milton’s epics and Coalbrookdale’s engines became peculiarly appealing for this extreme ...”

“... first there was a conflict over the future of a BP joint venture in Russia; then there was the war with Georgia; and finally Putin’s Putinesque suggestion that the recalcitrant owner of Russia’s largest mining company should watch his health, ha ha. But since the collapse of the American stock indices the Russian exchanges have been plummeting. In fact ...”

“... Britain was still at the top table of the Big Three or Four, a Victor Power of the Second World War which should never be classed with mere nation-states like France or Albania. Back then, the media and politics thrived on the patriot superlative: this or that British bridge or factory chimney or ancient monument regulation was the longest or the tallest or ...”

“... the majority, is bent on reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favour a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic ...”

“... then), that her paintings are domestic or amateurish, that the Bloomsbury Group fiddled during the war, that the Omega creations were shoddy, that her best work is derivative and her late work poor. Much of this seems to matter less than it did – who cares if the handles fell off their jugs? – or doesn’t seem particularly helpful: when is an artist ...”

“... and camels. Al-‘ajaj is dust stirred up by the wind. Al-rahaj wa-’l-qastal is the dust of war; al-khayda‘a, the dust of a battle. Al-‘ithyar, the dust of feet.’ Man is a microcosm of this sublime universe, as Book II, ‘On the Human Being’, conveys. The human has 360 bones and 360 veins, one for each day of the year. His faculty of reason ...”

“... of reciprocity – in this case, the hope that the gesture might forestall a disastrous war with the European power. The rhino was loaded in chains onto a Portuguese ship in Goa and delivered to King Manuel I, who had two bright ideas. The first was to organise a duel in Lisbon between the rhino and an already captive elephant. (Witnesses say the ...”

“... was a clear logic operating’ in the response to the financial crisis of 2008-9. ‘It was a class logic, admittedly – “Protect Wall Street first, worry about Main Street later” – but at least it had a rationale and one operating on a grand scale. To impute that same logic to the management of the Eurozone is to give Europe’s leaders too much ...”

“... Case’. Poor Cow, the title of Nell Dunn’s novel and Ken Loach’s film of 1967 about a working-class London girl who gets everything wrong, might have applied to her.On 23 April 1726, Mary Toft was at work in the fields near Godalming in Surrey with two female friends when a rabbit leaped up beside them. All three women were pregnant and probably ...”

“... when referring to the New York Times. ‘Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.’ Like every white person of her generation she has skeletons in her closet: until the age of 22, she did not realise that the California Raisins were racist.Every day the masses enter the portal and study, with ‘a single eye’, the ...”

“... brutal coercion – was closed. Maxwell’s alternative strategy was to woo the Scottish working class with the promise of an independent socialist state.Before its overhaul by Maxwell and the 79-ers, as Jackson shows, the SNP was the preserve of an atypical but conventional enough minority of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie. There was a smattering of poets and ...”

“... takes the ‘ordinary life of a living person who died before his or her time in the Second World War and gives him or her a voice’. They have been a great success for a small publisher called Jupiter Press (the latest title has sold 40,000 copies this spring alone), hastening its acquisition by HarperCollins. Eve’s irritating editor, Amanda ...”

“... most exquisite fantasies Hollywood would ever mount, and made a sensation of Bacall. It’s in the class of an Astaire musical. ‘Slim’ in the film was wearing clothes based on the ones Slim wore in life, and ‘Steve’, her name for Harry in the film, was what the real Slim called Howard. There was a coy home movie playing out within the melodrama on ...”

“... But these reservations, Bull points out, ‘would not necessarily have extended to cataclysmic war, mass extermination, the renewal of slavery and the breeding of a master race’. How to undo this malevolent influence? Bull’s approach is typically devious. Rather than breaking the news that breeding a master race is a bad idea, he takes issue with ...”

“... in All That Man Is about a young Hungarian man, Balázs, who goes to London as muscle for a high-class call girl). But the core of the second István episode, symmetrical to the first, is his attempt to start a relationship with his uncle’s stepdaughter, Noémi, with whom he is ‘sort of in love’. Pages of droll conversation, revolving largely around ...”