“... the early evening, we found that familiar markers had vanished. Novelty towers in striking colours rose above the remnants of dirty industries. The old detour that once carried hikers across the lethal swirl of the Bow flyover has been replaced by a shivering pontoon walkway, on the fence of which somebody has sprayed the obvious response: ever changing ...”

“... would bring fewer bills to cash, since they would be worth less. In this way, as discount rates rose, credit got tighter, and less money would be put into the economy. This would cause prices to fall, making local goods cheaper to foreign buyers and the cost of foreign goods more expensive. Again, exports would rise, imports would fall, and gold would flow ...”

“... prints were 850,000 years old, the oldest human footprints outside Africa and by far the earliest mark of human presence in Britain. Surging tides had exposed long-hidden marks of a group of H. antecessor walking upriver: an adult and a group of children travelling along the muddy estuary where the Thames used to meet the sea, until glaciers shifted its ...”

“... tenth of that owned by the local duke, a Tory, but they intended to be his political equals. They rose financially and socially through service to the army and the crown, at home and abroad. One Grey became private secretary to Prince Albert and then to Queen Victoria. Charles Grey’s father – the first Earl Grey – was a tough, blunt soldier who did well ...”

“... the Ottoman Empire and consolidate their own state through European intervention – was fulfilled.Mark Mazower opens his history of the Greek Revolution with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. As Gramsci wrote of Croce, there is a politics of start dates. By choosing 1815, Mazower signals that he wants to incorporate the revolution in a wider story about ...”

“... approach of A.S. Neill. The outcome was less than happy. He tried to abolish the strap. Parents rose up in arms at ‘classroom chaos’ and ‘lack of educational progress’. A great many pupils demonstrated in his favour. An enquiry was held: Mackenzie was suspended, and retired before his time. My teacher relatives in Aberdeen used to speak of him ...”

“... be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more difficult. His private life was extraordinary ...”

“... be ‘improper to leave them out in any modern play’. They were generally believed honest, one mark of which may have been that, as Beattie calculates, between 1770 and 1790, of prosecutions where the runners gave evidence 79 per cent ended in a guilty verdict; the figure fell to 59 per cent where they did not. Fielding would have liked to run a force ...”

“... he adopted his pseudonym in 1989, at the dawn of the country’s short-lived perestroika – he rose through the ranks of the army. Before leaving Algeria in 2000, he fought against the Islamists for eight years, and even helped lay two ambushes intended for his cadet school classmate Said Mekhloufi, by then an Islamist militant. (Mekhloufi was eventually ...”

“... wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made sanctions again seem a better alternative and their use rose dramatically. They have also grown more powerful, focusing on what Edward Fishman in his new study describes as one of the key ‘chokepoints’ in the world economy: control of the US dollar. Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic ...”

“... costs would fall as the health of the population improved, was shown to be untrue. Instead, costs rose progressively as more conditions became treatable, as expectation of life increased, as methods of treatment became more expensive, as pay was increased and as more staff were employed. The change in the relation between patient and doctor began in the ...”

“... he is allegedly explaining modern art. At the other end of the scale, realist works range from Mark Wallinger’s hyper-realist racehorse pictures and Richard Patterson’s monumental painting of a tiny plastic model of a minotaur through to the ‘bad’ and faux-naif portraiture of Martin Maloney and James Rielly. Other painters adapt traditional Realist ...”

“... argument, we need to turn to his account of what he calls positive liberty. Berlin’s attempt to mark off this separate concept is admittedly dogged by several false starts. He begins by suggesting that, whereas negative liberty is freedom from constraint, positive liberty is freedom to follow a certain form of life. But this distinction cannot be used to ...”

“... political movement to implement that critique). By these means he learned to see. Like Naipaul, he rose above the prison of his origins to imagine an India that was hygienic, cleansed and reformed. To make this point more dramatic, Naipaul summons up a contrasting figure: a man who left India and yet saw nothing. This is in order once more to support his ...”

“... population had lost its connection to land and a feeling for what it could do. Nobody quoted Mark Twain: ‘Buy land, they’re not making it any more.’ Nobody explained, as Christophers does here, that land is an ideal vehicle for the storage and distribution of value: finite but also ubiquitous, fungible on a global scale, the favoured form of ...”