“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reality, though it is a confusing one, as it seems to place Thomas’s mission in the extreme north of India, thousands of miles from Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which are now the heartland of the tradition. According to the Acts, Thomas journeyed from Jerusalem to India in the company of a merchant, who was employed by a ‘King of the Indians’ called ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ivy League, ‘egg-headed, homosexual, left-leaning financiers’, as the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy described them, unfit for the rough and tumble real world? The new rich despised the rules that bound entrepreneurs in the name of social security. They detested the welfare state, which, as they saw it, only coddled the lazy and the losers. They ...”

“... them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the preserve of Palestinian ...”

“... the election.*On an unannounced visit to the Korean demilitarised zone, including a few steps into North Korean territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson, as well as Ivanka. Carlson says of North Korea: ‘It’s a disgusting place, obviously. So ...”

“... and young, brilliant Miss Aikin was clearly its darling. Chief among the stars on the faculty was Joseph Priestley, who was already beginning to experiment with electricity and gases and later became a prominent natural philosopher and radical. Anna Aikin regarded the Priestleys as her second parents, and addressed them affectionately in several poems; but ...”

“... of this system approached a kind of apartheid, as in the notorious ‘Cutteslowe Walls’ in North Oxford, seven feet high and topped off with iron spikes, built in the 1930s but still standing 20 years later, for the purpose of separating a middle-class suburban enclave from the neighbouring working-class housing estate. But the need for hierarchy seems ...”

“... and in 1700 accepting the living of the parish of Laracor in County Meath, half a day’s ride north of Dublin. This was a period of great disappointment and bitterness in his professional life, as time and again he was passed over for the more prestigious offices he felt his intellect and experience deserved. His chief consolation was the pleasure he took ...”