“... to Egypt and Europe, met his hero George Meredith, and moved smoothly into bisexual, upper-class Edwardian London circles. He had affairs with the sculptor Ronald Sutherland (Lord Gower, decadent model for Wilde’s Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray), the theatre designer Percy Anderson, and ‘the Ranee of Sarawak’, Lady Margaret Brooke. He ...”

“... local priest out of the temple at the age of six, nor was he summoned by the Mexican minister of war to lecture generals about tactics and fortifications at the age of II, nor was his family banished from Guanajuato in 1893 for their dangerous progressive views: on the death of a financial patron, they moved to Mexico City, where his parents found new ...”

“... Size matters – especially in business. In the quarter-century following the American Civil War, consolidation – in the form of trusts, mergers, monopolies, syndicates and cartels – transformed the US economy, revolutionising transport, communications and industrial production. The industrialists and financiers who shaped the new economy regarded its international ascendancy as natural and inevitable ...”

“... in the ancient imaginaire (so far as images were concerned). As for the heroes of the Trojan War, the myths mentioned in Homer’s Iliad now seemed measurably less important than the ones he missed out: the judgment of Paris, the rape of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, at Cape Cuttlefish in Thessaly, Achilles’ murderous advances towards Hector’s little ...”

“... or political theory is here not a matter of empirical interests or even ideologies and parties, of class struggle as such: it constitutes an ontological inquiry into the very possibility for biologically isolated human beings to form groups which can function as historical agencies. Nor is Patron’s preoccupation with violence to be grasped as a merely ...”

“... the streets mourning the first and last to love me. McGreevy had fought in the First World War, seeing active service at Ypres and the Somme, where he was wounded twice. By the time he met Beckett, he already knew Joyce and his circle in Paris and had met Eliot in London. Besides his short book on Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces ...”

“... or Mill’s conception of value, understate central aspects of each: the simple chauvinism of War and Peace, the mysticism in Anna Karenina, the agrarian socialism of the Bell, the declared utilitarianism of On Liberty. The result is to make each sound somewhat closer to their commentator than it really is. His readings of Vico and Herder, the major ...”

“... tempering the true-blue Boston Brahmin birthright which conferred, as he sometimes felt, the first-class soul of the patrician. There isn’t a line that isn’t well-born. Lowell’s writings do not broadcast the conception I am describing, and it is one he would have been ready to mock. Such a rejection lay well within the compass of his ambivalence. He was ...”

“... manning a gun in Baghdad, stencilled on the front of the gun a death’s head. That’s why the war is lost. 25 January. I’ve taken to eating the occasional date, though it’s not a fruit I wholly like. Mam used to eat them when we were little, bought in small compressed bricks, one of their attractions being that they were not on the ration or even on ...”

“... His father, Abd al-Qadir, was a sheikh who had fought in the 1936 Arab Revolt and in the 1948 war with Israel; he had also been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the militant Islamist group founded in Egypt in 1928. Mishal, during his childhood in Silwad, saw little of his father: in 1957, Abd al-Qadir had taken a second wife and moved with her to ...”

“... The pataphysician Alfred Jarry was so excited by the close-fitting kit that, before the First War, he took to dressing in the uniform of a cycle racer. He caused a scandal by following Mallarmé’s funeral cortège on his bicycle. Jarry’s provocative text ‘The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’ was the acknowledged inspiration for ...”

“... confining themselves – as Timothy Brennan usefully reminds us – to no more for now but a holy war or jihad against the school known as ‘literary modernisn’. Of course religion is a thing of this world rather than the next, and there have always been, since well before Greenmantle, ‘their’ Muslims and ‘ours’. Nothing is more ironic than to hear ...”

“... of Catholicism, to their involvement in catamaran fishing (and hence their evolution into a class of capitalist boat-owners), to their retention of traditional caste and kin loyalties in their recruitment to occupational roles, or to their philanthropic largesse in their local roles as community leaders. Again, all these hypotheses may be valid, and if ...”

“... the idea that this particular model of living can be successful when inhabited by the middle-class intelligentsia, but … it can be a wholesale prescription neither for the welfare state nor for the renewal of the traditional city as the 20th century disastrously demonstrated.’ That is a lot of weight for two blocks of luxury flats to carry. Anxious ...”

“... a rise and fall in the fortunes of many of the subjects.’ Again: ‘While the emerging middle class was in general looking more to reading as a source of information, enlightenment and entertainment, middle-class women in particular were looking for confirmation and clarification of their own new ...”