“... rates, as for a few years it did. The decisive monetary event took place in October 1979, when Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, hiked interest rates to unprecedented levels, inducing a severe recession in North America and Europe as well as what came to be known as the Third World debt crisis, as the countries of the global South found that ...”

“... Osborne’s nickname in the Bullingdon Club: he was an oik because he didn’t go to Eton, only St Paul’s.) It is the Opposition’s job to oppose, and perhaps the Tory high command did not want the financial crisis to resemble the Iraq war as a crisis where both the big parties disagreed with public opinion. But the practical effect of the opposingness has ...”

“... state. Within this general explanatory model, several emphases and refinements are possible. Linda Levy Peck focuses on the function of the monarch and of his court in dispensing the goodies of patronage in a situation of rising demand, demographically and economically induced, and static or falling supply. As the English case of Buckingham suggests, in such ...”

“... resistance cell and the following year it was under assault. Two heads of department were shot. Paul Rivet, the founder of the museum, who’d helped set up the Institut d’ethnologie with Marcel Mauss and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in the 1920s, was also active in the resistance. In 1942, he left for Colombia. Did anthropology become linked, in some mythical way ...”

“... as a writer’. While in an earlier generation many women regarded her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre as a brave and inspiring model of liberated sexuality, many feminists today see her lifelong insistence that his superior intellect entitled him to her unqualified service as a form of self-abasement that perpetuated the most conventional elements of ...”

“... at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit ...”

“... The first task, which she quickly accomplished, was to wrest control over his writing from Paul Gast, his closest associate and the only one who could read his handwriting, and her mother. She hired a new editor, who flattered her, and to establish a Nietzsche archive, acquired the services of Rudolf Steiner, who had published an influential book on ...”

“... pursued. Then I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It ...”

“... Marx. The most technical, Business Cycles, which he worked on at Harvard, was later described by Paul Samuelson, whom Schumpeter had thought the cleverest of the students there, as ‘Pythagorean moonshine’. Yet in 1940, Schumpeter succeeded to the presidency of the Econometrics Society and in 1949 became the first president of the International Economic ...”

“... a finer nuance of meaning. In their excellent compilation, The Jew in the Modern World (1980), Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz point out that the term’s origin is theological. More specifically, it ‘derives from the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scripture into Greek from the third century BC, in which holokaustos (“totally ...”

“... it contained little that was not in Jerome’s My Life and Times, his novelised autobiography Paul Kelver, or his essays. Sir James Barrie, a friend of Jerome, was asked for recollections and said that everything relevant was in My Life and Times. Others apparently took a similar view. They could have been conspiring to conceal something, or they could ...”

“... corporate espionage outfit, with a list of staff and advisers that includes the Conservative peers Paul Deighton and William Hague, director and chairman respectively. The former Labour minister Shriti Vadera sits on the advisory board. ‘Hakluyt sells its political connections,’ a contact who has worked in London’s corporate intelligence world for ...”

“... billion in 2015, equivalent to almost 2 per cent of the state’s total tax revenue. This levy had only modest effects on the capital held by the wealthy: since 1988 the assets of the top 1 per cent have increased threefold and those of the top 0.1 per cent fivefold. However, from the exchequer’s point of view, it wasn’t a trifling ...”

“... to be the narrator, and to dramatising the guilty pleasure – in a literary culture that honours Paul Valéry’s refusal to write sentences like ‘The Marquise went out at five o’clock’ – of arbitrarily making stuff up. According to Binet, The Seventh Function’s destabilised reality is modelled after the move from pseudo-memoir to fantasy in Bret ...”

“... enjoyable new history of the Protectorate, which collapsed nine months after Cromwell’s death, Paul Lay is bracing and undeceived in his judgments. He is the editor of History Today, and he writes in the best tradition of that magazine, accessible but sound in detail, with an alert eye for the significant details academic historians sometimes slide ...”