“... his father’s pacifism and spent the later part of the First World War as an orderly in northern France. After the war he studied architecture in London and then took a job as a clerk of works at the Plaza Paramount in Piccadilly, which had ornate Renaissance-style plasterwork and a Wurlitzer organ. The Plaza opened in 1926, the year before The Jazz ...”

“... principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working class’ (a phrase Engels used without irony). In a letter of ...”

“... party in the pub shook their heads over the technological defeatism of the Americans: the missile rose out of the earth’s atmosphere, steered by four graphite rudders in its slipstream. One hundred kilometres up, it reached the top of an are as neat as the illustration of a parabola in a geometry textbook. You have to pause for a moment, there, as the ...”

“... glacial career testified), whereas the unfashionable engineers had serious peacetime duties, rose faster and could transfer back at a higher rank in the event of war. The ploy worked. MacArthur was never much of an engineer, but he learned the basics of harbours, pontoons and bridges, knowledge which would one day come in handy on remote Pacific ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... He held secret talks with China, made a deal of sorts with Libya, struck an agreement with France to purchase a plutonium-reprocessing plant and hired Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist then employed in Holland and now regarded, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as a parent of Pakistan’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear programme which competes with, but does not ...”

“... pretty bad century so far. This is partly a matter of electoral defeats, from the US to the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Brazil etc, but also a consequence of its failure to come up with a new ideological framework to match the new landscape. Many current problems seem likely to grow worse. In 1980, the bottom half of earners in the US took home 20 per cent ...”

“... unappealing to Rabat, which was racking up its external debt with every day the war drew on. France had supported the king, diplomatically and militarily, during the first phase of the takeover and would remain the most obstinate of Morocco’s allies. The US, too, was an important patron and when the Moroccans eventually hit on the idea of a long ...”

“... purchase with the advent of national accounting surveys, first in England around 1700 and later in France. In 1791 Antoine Lavoisier produced estimates of France’s income and wealth and, as Piketty points out with a hint of republican pride, ‘the new tax system established after the Revolution, which ended the privileges ...”

“... From the artist’s point of view, as Roos shows, the reasons are clear. In mid-19th-century France, the Salon was the public exhibition which mattered, the only dunghill on which the competing cocks could crow. No other way of showing your work – private exhibitions, group exhibitions, displays by picture dealers, sales of prints – could equal ...”

“... distance, to be sure of what it was that Duff Cooper actually did, apart from being Ambassador to France. But that lay in the future. First the Coopers had to be poor in Gower Street, with nobody except Rubinstein to play the piano, while Chaliapin sang and rose-petals descended on the guests. Getting to know absolutely ...”

“... buoyant in the 16th century, with high fertility and, normally, low mortality, so that the total rose from some two and three-quarter million in 1541 to 4.1 million in 1601 and 5.13 million in 1656. But the age of marriage was rising, and also the percentage not marrying. The age of marriage reached a plateau level in the mid-17th century and stayed there ...”

“... d’être. The end of polarisation has also removed the underpinnings of many a foreign policy: France looks lost now that Gaullism no longer makes any sense, and the Chinese have reacted with outright dismay (and growing anti-Americanism) to their similar loss of leverage. Throughout the Third World the ending of the Cold War is a diplomatic disaster. Now ...”

“... black dogs.’ She is referring to her mother’s encounter with two huge German attack dogs in France after the war. The dogs were not only literally dangerous, possibly rabid, they were for their victim the incarnation of the human minds which had trained them, ‘creations of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could ...”

“... if it was ‘mature’, a word always on the lips of tutors and graduate assistants: mature art ‘rose above the passions of faction’; mature people ‘accepted society as it was and didn’t seek to alter it’ (in a spirit of Christian or Eliot-like resignation); mature judgment was ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion ...”