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“... in tandem with steam technologies, horses were used to harvest, thresh and bale hay, and in mills to grind flour; to pull stagecoaches and canal boats over long distances and omnibuses, streetcars and hackney cabs over shorter ones; to move goods to and from factories, farms and markets around the clock. A world without horses must have been as hard to ...”

“... would-be Indian industrialists like the Tata family were repeatedly baulked from setting up steel mills or digging coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest ...”

“... after the disappearance of the Bourbons? England had its steam-engine and its Lancashire cotton mills. But France, after the fall of the Ancien Régime, distinguished itself by shutting up most of its young males in barracks. While serving under the flag, and away from their villages, these temporary soldiers lost their innocence with prostitutes or ...”

“... and momentous events is a familiar move in Boyd’s fiction. In The New Confessions (1987), John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker, fights in the trenches, is pauperised by the Wall Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of ...”

“... On their marriage in 1819, the Austins moved to London and became close friends of Bentham, the Mills, Grote, and other leading philosophic radicals. (Indeed, Austin ‘proposed’ discipleship to Bentham in terms more passionate by far than those he employed in proposing marriage to Sarah. He talked of being ‘inflamed’ with a desire to help diffuse ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”

“... of Dorothea and Will there is, certainly, some ‘cherishing’ by George Eliot (what Henry James calls an ‘elaborate solemnity’). There is too much insistence on Dorothea’s ‘ardour’ and even ‘adorableness’, and too much stress on Will’s being a ‘bright creature’. Yet in the love scenes, particularly the final one in Chapter ...”

“... a message from Cohen, asking if he could pay him a visit. A few weeks after Obama’s victory, James Glassman, another Bush-era official at the State Department, delivered a lecture at the New America Foundation in which he made much of the internet. Glassman had been to Bogotá with Cohen, and began by telling the story of the One Million Voices ...”

“... system devised for the analysis of Russian folk-tales can be adapted to the later novels of Henry James. The microscopic machinery of phonemic analysis can be blown up to the macroscopic scale and used to examine the structure of narrative. And endless fascinating variations can be discovered in practically anything by applying what the French (but nobody ...”

“... bright enough to be preparing a lecture on Chardin’s brushstrokes, so why would she invoke Mills & Boon as her chapter and verse? Good question, but don’t ask it. Varying Degrees of Hopelessness is situated within a realm of farce where caricatures run the show and logic is given an indefinite leave of absence. And, in the modern manner, where farce ...”

“... intimacy is at least worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the ...”

“... oil everywhere. The steam engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills … oozed and trickled it … And their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly.’ Machine oil attached to everything. And it was enervating, just like the heat from the machinery, heat which the oil seemed to permeate and make heavier; the ...”

“... father, as he did with Carlyle, timely matters such as the arrival of industrialisation – silk mills, railways, lake steamers, telegraph poles – to blight the Northern Italian landscape. Closer to home, at that moment the stench from the polluted Thames was forcing the Houses of Parliament to sit with canvas over their windows wet with chloride of ...”

“... cases Jaggers took on, routine criminality and domestic violence – the immemorial grist of the mills of justice. But, beginning about the time of the resounding failure in 1866 of the large and universally trusted Overend Gurney bank, whose directors proved to have been swindlers, high-flying financiers like Merdle (in Little Dorrit) and Melmotte (in ...”

“... stay in Italy. Then after Christmas I read Gabriele Annan’s review in the LRB (7 January) of James Fox’s The Langhorne Sisters – Nancy had been the middle one of the five – and began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now ...”