“... rate – it’s fixed in euros, but paid in pounds – it’s more stable and reliable than the price of wheat, which, in the past nine years, has twice doubled and twice halved, sometimes from one year to the next. Since he became a Ukip MEP in 2009 Agnew has relinquished day to day running of the farm to his wife, Diana, who deals with their 35,000 ...”

“... Gasp at the scale model. Blush at the hubris of the promotional displays. Giant blow-ups of ‘Richard Rogers’s original sketch of the Greenwich Dome’ are twinned with ‘a sketch design for a dome by Sir Christopher Wren’. The puny scale of St Paul’s Cathedral is set against the enclosed acres of the tent on Bugsby’s Marshes. ‘This awesome ...”

“... expense of creditors and stockholders. And if savers are also small shareholders, as many are, the price they pay for protecting their deposits is the devaluation of their shares. This is absolutely not what was originally intended. The rationing of house building has one other consequence: it means that many cannot acquire somewhere adequate to live. As a way ...”

“... smaller scales or much good at making money was somehow no obstacle to their admiration.) When the price of oil rocketed in the 1970s, mainstream America began to take seriously the counterculture’s dream of redesigning industrial society. Solar panels flourished, empty six-packs became the bricks for houses, fish grew to edible size in plastic tanks and ...”

“... so full of life, so packed with jolly anecdotes, would be bound to fetch a more than handsome price if offered for general sale. Might there not be a way of having his cake and eating it too? Hogarth’s answer was to advertise a ‘subscription’, a raffle. Visitors to his studio were invited to inspect the painting there, where they could buy one or ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”

“... of an industry grew up to massage the bruised national ego – see for instance Kipling’s Sir Richard Dalyngridge stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). The Normans weren’t really French, after all, the argument went, just transplanted Vikings, which on the Victorian ethnic map made them almost relatives. But there was ...”

“... energy so effectively that he achieved only superficial changes (the main one being to lower the price to a penny). He complained that reforming the culture at Printing House Square was ‘like filling a pneumatic tyre with a leak in it’, and suggested that ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ should be inscribed over its ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... of a Lady she had long admired, set the seal on her success in this evasion: but there was a price to be paid, that of submission to the Jamesian codes, an acceptance of his rank. She addressed him as Cher Maître, and the genuine affection of Cher could not altogether prevent the mastery from rankling. Edith Wharton had pots of money already, unlike ...”

“... but a good book’. Whitman listened respectfully to the sympathetic old Brahmin, but felt the price was too high. ‘If I had cut sex out,’ he mused later, ‘I might just as well have cut everything out.’ But he was never caught, as Lawrence was to be, in the trap of a readership that supposed sex to be his special thing. Openness about it was so ...”

“... Depp prancing around wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that ...”

“... Cradock points out, the apparent Soviet triumph in squashing Dubcek carried a huge long-term price. It was soon apparent that disagreement within what Brezhnev called ‘the Socialist Commonwealth’ would lead to military suppression. Albania immediately walked out of the Warsaw Pact, and the Chinese, after much reflection, contacted ...”

“... The City and Social Theory, of the urban concerns of Louis Wirth, Georg Simmel, Theodor Roszak and Richard Sennet. (For some strange reason, Smith adds Sigmund Freud to the list, but this merely shows that his book is in the nature of a dissertation, rather than a treatise.) Smith would like to harmonise all these theories in some imprecise dialectic (‘the ...”

“... Of course, we should have reservations about the use of anecdote as a basis for public policy. Richard Posner once remarked that the United States is a nation of more than a quarter-billion people closely watched by a horde of journalists. Every bad thing that can happen will happen and it will be reported; so it may be worth not panicking until we see ...”