“... which he sits in for a while, poking the fire, daydreaming. Then he bestirs himself again, presses north towards his bed, the place where ‘for one half of our life’ we forget ‘the sorrows of the other half’. And so on, ‘from the expedition of the Argonauts to the Assembly of Notables, from the lowest depths of hell to the last fixed star beyond the ...”

“... he died. Only one thing rescued Fitzgerald’s name from a dismal place between Floyd Dell and Joseph Hergesheimer on the list of forgotten novelists of the 1920s – the novel Perkins called ‘a wonder’. In Careless People, her new book on the writing of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell proceeds with a sturdy working theory: that it helps to ...”

“... both routes, until the whole project ramifies uncontrollably. The exploitation of the forests of North America is a vast enough subject, but she feels the need to take characters to New Zealand at two historical moments to enrich a record that was already in danger of bursting. She struggles to find a cut-off point, with the first section of the book set in ...”

“... du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of Wilmington. His firm became the largest supplier of explosives to the Union during the Civil War and it now ranks fourth among US corporations as a generator of air pollution. Among its innovations are nylon, Teflon, Mylar, Tyvek and Kevlar. It made the ...”

“... with one another, and held together by little more than panegyric. The Christian kingdoms of the north were equally fragmented and subsisted on raiding the south. In an organised system of extortion, Muslim rulers struck deals with Christian kings and warlords, paying tributes known as parias in exchange for protection. Christian and Muslim rulers were ...”

“... W. Bush repeatedly linked Syria to the three members of his ‘axis of evil’ – Iraq, Iran and North Korea – throughout his presidency. State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush administration tried to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of ...”

“... House, Sydney already had what Australians hoped was a world-famous Bridge, endlessly repainted in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to ...”

“... Tunnel Boring Machines that dug her out, prepares for its rendezvous with the admired brickwork of Joseph Bazalgette’s overwhelmed Victorian outflow. Such imaginative solutions were required, at whatever the cost (in the end it was £4.3 billion), to reduce the horror of the raw sewage and indestructible sanitary and convenience products spewing into ...”

“... 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 ...”