“... his essay is full of admiration, and shows a deep acquaintance with his works. The critic Gerhard Joseph once suggested that Auden might have had in mind the old sense of ‘stupid’ as ‘stunned’ or ‘benumbed’ – as when Satan in Paradise Lost, momentarily struck as he gazes upon Eve, stands ‘Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed’. It was not ...”

“... Afrikaners. Among the sins it couldn’t forgive the British was the deadpan expression of Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies, when he toured the battlefields of South Africa. The paper had a point: the Boers fought – and lost – one of the first modern anti-imperialist struggles in Africa. Britain’s concentration camps in ...”

“... lost his childhood.Before leaving for Palestine, Joe took a flat at Regent House, Zamalek, just north of the Gezira Club. This was the most popular residential area for the Inglizi (two nearby blocks of flats were known as Elephant and Castle), so rents were high and, since their Egyptian owners tended to remove most of the furniture and rugs, the flats ...”

“... head shining above the water as the sun goes down over drilling rigs beached by the receding North Sea tide. The magazine Management Today has developed a distinctive style of portrait photography in recent years. Here is a constant stream of successful business figures, but here also is a problematic redundancy of appearance: how can one promote the ...”

“... of the status quo and instead become its critic. In this respect his closest analogue is Joseph Stiglitz, also once of MIT, a member of the Clinton administration and chief economist to the World Bank. Both men have indisputable standing as members of the elite club of New Keynesians: Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel in 2001, Krugman in 2008. Where ...”

“... relief package: Surrey gets a vastly bigger pay-off than Teesside. Misery is concentrated. In the North-East, the poorest region in England, nearly a billion pounds has been sucked out of the economy since 2010. Middlesbrough – described as an ‘infant Hercules’ by Gladstone in 1862 – has its bright future long behind it. The council has the highest ...”

“... permission to come up to Paris on literary business. One of his fellow academicians, the novelist Joseph Rosny, remembered that ‘Huysmans behaved towards the members of the Academy like an old gentleman brimming over with consideration and respect. He seemed to have grown more compassionate, and he took a brotherly interest in our work.’Such mellowness ...”

“... a distinction disregarded by police rounding on people in parks; between the jogging culture of North London and the slums of Bangladesh, where the idea of social distancing, let alone of soap and hand sanitisers in abundance, is a sick joke; between the medical care given to the prime minister, assigned an ICU bed at a time of acute shortage while still ...”

“... his foreign adventures; she said the longest journey she had ever taken was from the South to the North Island. He asked if she would like to meet people who could help her travel abroad; she said she would. The man turned out to be an associate of Carvelli. Her statement emphasised how frightened she was that her mother might find out what she had done, as ...”

“... transition. The collapse of the great Tang empire into regional kingdoms and the Song loss of north China to Central Eurasian dynasties radically transformed the Chinese socio-economic order. The population almost doubled, rice production boomed in the south, huge cities gained populations of up to a million people, and old class barriers broke down. And ...”

“... favourite Hemingway sentences to see how they worked, Later, at Berkeley, she put Henry James and Joseph Conrad on a pedestal with Hemingway and agonised in a short story class with Mark Schorer that she was ‘not good enough’. The 1950s were the glory days of the New Criticism in university English departments, but Didion rejected I.A. Richards’s ...”

“... Klansmen and neo-Nazis – most of them veterans – drove to the site of a march in Greensboro, North Carolina, where members of the Communist Workers’ Party were protesting against the Klan’s attempt to sabotage their organising of black textile workers. Five of the protesters were killed in a shoot-out; 12 were wounded. The trial that followed ...”

“... a rentier economy.Savage dates the emergence of a new ‘inequality paradigm’ to 2011, when Joseph Stiglitz, and then Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez, publicly identified the ‘1 per cent’ as the source of America’s economic and social problems. The study of financial elites, rentier power, global inequality and wealth management took off ...”

“... countries of the fullest toleration – France in the Third Republic, western Austria under Franz Joseph, the Hungary of mass Magyar assimilation – the times of maximum stimulus for Jewish talent may have been those when the Jews became conscious of the limits of assimilation: the Fin-de-Siècle moment of Proust, who came to maturity in the Dreyfus ...”

“... more recently to find Isaiah Berlin lumping Burke in with ‘reactionary thinkers’ such as Joseph de Maistre. Berlin’s friend Stuart Hampshire is contemptuous not simply of Burke’s views but of the quality of his thought: Burke’s rhetoric was mere assertion. It was not proof or even argument. He was not clear and he was not consistent. He saw ...”