“... while you’d rather have my kidney than your money – possibly for resale to a third party at a mark-up. So we can swap to mutual advantage. In the jargon, the position we reach when I get the £2000 and you have my kidney is Pareto-optimal as regards the initial position: we have made someone (in fact, each of us) better off, while making nobody worse ...”

“... advance notice so that they suffer in the meantime, and who makes them wear white ribbons as a mark of sin, a reminder that they have strayed from purity. In this village, even the children might be villains. The way some of the children band together around Klara, the oldest of the pastor’s children, had always seemed odd to the narrator. Her brother ...”

“... another well-established move for a Swiss hippie – dropped out to become an Alpine herdsman. He rose at four every morning, milking cows, making cheese, learning to weld, lay bricks, keep bees and stitch his own lederhosen. After four years he tired of cows and moved on to sheep. In the mountains he began the diaries, accompanied by beautiful and meticulous ...”

“... based on fleeting shared interests, and fighting against enemies from their own faiths.Rodrigo rose to prominence as an uncommonly skilled warrior in the court of Sancho II of Castile, where he was head of the king’s personal retinue. After Sancho’s sudden death, he entered the service of the late king’s brother Alfonso VI, ruler of the now enlarged ...”

“... historian of the PCI, describes an Apulian peasant who kept a map in his stables where he would mark with a pin the progress of the Russian advance during 1943 and 1944 and then calculate how many hours it would take them to cross the Adriatic and get to his village. In Sicily, militants like Calogero waited for ‘Uncle Joe’ (in Sicilian dialect, lu zi ...”

“... or just a Post-Modern romparama of the sort Umberto Eco managed so elegantly in The Name of the Rose. It’s much more densely webbed with allusiveness. And its mood is far more rigorously subjunctive: it’s an open network of potentialities, like a mutating spreadsheet or grid. It is all these things because it is at bottom a historical novel, and one ...”

“... mend cars, keep dogs, but still have wondrously youthful chests and are always up for it. Dogs may mark the point at which Sallis and his deconstructed/reinvented crime novel break away from the form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a barking ...”

“... dente subversive whose name was reviled at gymkhanas and golf tournaments around the county – he rose in our esteem. I find it odd, but not surprising, that he’s once again a family man – in my family at any rate. In the last two years I’ve reinvested in the productions of Mopheads Inc at the request of two boys under the age of six for whom the death ...”

“... an unhappy, or even tragic view of people in the world, which is often attributed to Freud; and Mark Edmundson, in his introduction to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, makes some similar fine distinctions. Freud is ‘our prose-poet of the heart’s desire to break’, he writes, but the master also relishes his own reductiveness. Edmundson ...”

“... despite the scale of the crisis facing the British energy industry. The Burnham government may mark a turning point. It has promised to set out plans for ‘stronger public control’ of essential services, though the relationship between control and ownership has yet to be defined.In January 2009, a border dispute between Ukraine and Russia led to a rapid ...”

“... Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata. The entire platform was covered with people. We found a ...”

“... an executive vice president at UnitedHealth, one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the department, upped sticks in 2009 to become global head of health for the consultants KPMG. This last move did have the ...”

“... in favour of refurbishment. It had originally planned to replace 528 flats with only 120 homes.Mark Slater, a tenant activist who lives on a high floor of one of the Seven Sisters, showed me round his flat. He’s a 72-year-old single man and doesn’t live in luxury, but he has a home. The windows look out on the town below and the moors, Saddleworth and ...”

“... my starting point: London Stone. This beacon, on the east bank of the Yantlet Creek, is said to mark the point at which the Thames merges with the North Sea. ‘From London Stone the ships set their course for the Nore lightship and the waves of the ocean. The song of the Thames has ended.’ Walking west, away from the creek, a wide-sky epic from ...”

“... may seem merely stock items, rearranged in routine ways. One will not have impressed one’s mark on the language, but rather have spent one’s life shoving about already-coined pieces. So one will not really have had an ‘I’ at all. One’s poems, and one’s self, will just be better or worse instances of familiar types. This is what Harold Bloom ...”