“... the market (the other two were Ladbrokes and William Hill). I was a cashier, which meant I took in the bets, made a record of them (using a fairly rudimentary photocopying system) and paid out to the lucky winners. Behind me and a couple of other cashiers sat the manager, a kindly, depressive middle-aged man who sorted all the bets by hand, totted up ...”

“... natural order, Strauss remarked, which the liberal conception of culture had forgotten. Schmitt took these objections in his stride, making a few quiet adjustments in subsequent editions of his work to accentuate the hints of a religious background that Strauss had noted. He also helped Strauss get to France before Hitler came to power. Six months after the ...”

“... of conquest with their in-built drive to the oppression of conquered peoples. Militarism – she took the Incas and Sparta as her examples – was the key to exploitation, a form of foundational violence; hence her revulsion at Germany’s slide into militarism and war. But, she wrote in ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism’, there is one thing that ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... order), Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, the who what where why when remains unjournalistically unclear. It took DeWitt some time to reply, but when she did, the pair of them began an email correspondence. They are not, on the surface, compatible: he is a tabloid fixer and party animal, an imbiber and ingester; she is a solitary intellectual, weaving quietly at her ...”

“... provoked by the debris, odour and viscid substances did not diminish. Indeed, it strengthened. It took shape as a common perception of the phone box as phobic object or site. Penelope Gilliatt’s plague novel, One by One (1965), begins with an abortive call from a public booth so hot that the caller’s hand leaves a mark on the receiver ‘as though he were ...”

“... in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new star has risen in the East.’ Since then, Pamuk has been compared to Joyce and Musil, Kafka and Calvino, and almost never – a further compliment – to the ...”

“... conference, part transitional government, the CNS was meant to be the mechanism that took Zaire into the post-Cold War world of multiparty democracy. The impetus for its decision came in part from the growing conflict in the Kivus. In North Kivu it had begun as class unrest, when mainly Hutu landlords began to evict poor Hutu peasants during the ...”

“... Hall, which opened in 1612, was an imposing three-storey house standing at the bottom end of St John’s Street, not far from Smithfield market. When it was built the street had to be rerouted around it, which did not please the residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving ...”

“... what … We were more like two streams coming together to make a third.’ The diamond miner took a less sentimental view of the collaboration. ‘We’re really not of the same dimension,’ he complained in his diaries. ‘I’m sort of an inveterate autodidact, a do-it-yourself guy, a sort of Jules Verne.’ Guattari resented ‘being strapped onto ...”

“... all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year before Gilbert set sail and now in the British Library, shows a rich mixture of strip-fields, commons and orchards, as well as the large number of fields already enclosed by the landowner and ...”

“... nuclear scientists. ‘It’s critical for us to know going forward,’ the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said in June, that ‘those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.’ France has said that any agreement that doesn’t include inspections of military sites would be ‘useless’. Iran has been adamant ...”

“... He sieved biographies, letters and accounts of those he considered great men – whether John Adams or Confucius – to produce poems with distinct overtones of hero-worship. In politics this tendency led to his admiration for Mussolini, and even to that view of Hitler as ‘a Saint’. While caged in Pisa in the closing days of the war, he set to ...”

“... who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her early books received. Auden’s introduction to A Change of World (1951) characterised her poems as ‘neatly ...”

“... of this cusp moment in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, of how or why Hütter and Schneider took their new pan-European direction. There’s a lot of boilerplate about starting from scratch and looking for a new identity, but few details of Sisyphean slog or Eureka! moments in among the shiny new electronic gear. Even a Kraftwerk sceptic like myself ...”