“... a contradiction in terms. It would have done better to make an appeal to the Midlands and the North to impose their will on the South-East; or best of all, it could have invoked the return of the Roman leaders whose stamp on the urban forms of the ancient world is examined in The Idea of a Town. At the end of the day, planning is about authority and about ...”

“... in the novel, mimicking (in alphabetical order, not the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary ...”

“... coincidence of Arthur taking his Upper Amazon employment in the City of London at just the moment Joseph Conrad was in Brussels reluctantly accepting command of a fever-inducing riverboat from the managing director of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. Lucho, our invaluable Huancayo-based guide, a man dedicated to getting more sights ...”

“... from Keynes himself, modern day economists of a reformist disposition, such as Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, nonetheless reprise the sensibility typical of Keynesianism. Keynes​ was the paradigm, but was he the first Keynesian? Mann’s answer is bold. If Keynesianism is a constructive liberal response to revolution, a response that seeks to ...”

“... with him did not know why they were there or what they were fighting for. Actual forces in North Africa, where Douglas fought and wrote his major poems, were a small proportion of the British Army as a whole, and it may be that their early deployment in 1940 immunised them against a general political infection. I doubt this, however: not even Spike ...”

“... 1930s. Carey’s populism sees only gentle Wellsian cyclists, not blackshirts. But Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth had something to fear from their masses. When Thomas Mann condemns ‘the vulgarity of Hitler’ and laments, in his diaries, the ‘wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild and stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical ...”

“... a relatively peaceful life in the small, obsessively erudite academic communities of Protestant north Germany’. For him, history was pragmatic in a sense different from that intended by the ancient writers. ‘In his world of well-ordered police states, charters rested on birth, orders emanated from the top, and birth order often determined the destiny of ...”

“... not unlike modern research institutes; the most famous of these were at Maragha, in present-day north-eastern Iran, which may even have housed visiting Chinese astronomers, and at Samarqand, which had an underground sextant with a forty-metre radius. Using observations made at Maragha in the 14th century, Ibn al-Shatir produced lunar and planetary ...”

“... governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ‘Christian convictions are under attack as never before … We are moving rapidly towards the criminalisation of Christianity.’ He has noted that ‘in the world I come from and choose to ...”

“... now managed by an erratic caucus of Lockhart, Cromie, Reilly and the French ambassador, Joseph Noulens, was in chaos. They had assumed that the British force at Archangel, under General Frederick Poole, would advance south to seize the junction town of Vologda. His march was supposed to be timed to support counter-revolutionary risings in towns ...”

“... by essentially compilatory works, the long lists and catalogues that culminated in the work of Joseph Eckhel, another Austrian and curator of the imperial coin cabinet in Vienna. His Doctrina numorum veterum invented some of the classificatory principles with which we still work, for instance the sequence in which Greek coinages are presented in ...”

“... to assuage British fears. In 1837, Iran tried to compensate for its losses to Russia in the north by strengthening its position to the east, and attacked Herat on the Afghan border. The Indian government, fearing that Russia would get involved, made two military responses. The naval response – occupying a Gulf island – paid off, and the Iranian ...”

“... Scotland. Shipyards, quays and graving docks squeezed together along the flat coastal strip to the north of the railway, while tenements, some of them spectacularly sited, lined the slopes that rose steeply to meet the Renfrewshire moorland. This was more or less the town as I first saw it. It seemed impossible that there could be a castle in such a workaday ...”

“... dark windows. Farrell’s folly seemed to be twinned with the other publishing conglomerate on the north side of the river: Random House. Marks modestly described his book as undernourished fiction, fiction buried beneath an excess of facts. It’s the first reflex of the con man, the bullshitter, to lay down a smokescreen of names, dates, addresses. Bore the ...”

“... house in Wilno, was sentenced to five years’ Siberian exile at Kirensk, a thousand kilometres north of Irkutsk. There he spent much of the time reading and listening to survivors from previous generations of Polish exiles: heroes of 1863 or socialist pioneers. When he was allowed to return to Wilno in 1892, family and friends didn’t recognise him: his ...”