“... 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 ...”

“... great shift of populations within the empire, a process paralleled in the tropical possessions of France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Germany. As the African slave trade ended, ‘free’ or indentured labour was imported to exploit colonial resources and build infrastructure. Chinese workers and their families poured into Malaya to operate its tin mines ...”

“... unlike the England of today, could conceive of … a merry supernaturalism’.‘Shakespeare never rose higher’ than in this play, which with its ‘silliness and violence’ leads us to think the ‘rowdies’ have ‘climbed over the footlights’. This mob rule is offered as the common sense of the man in the pub: ‘If ever the son of a man in his ...”

“... A low-income household in Britain is typically £3800 a year worse off than the equivalent one in France, something that makes a world of difference to the way this new inflationary crisis is experienced. Meanwhile, total household wealth (what people own, rather than what they make from wages) rose from three times GDP in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that the Comanches lacked any politics, properly speaking; that their social organisation never rose above the level of the hunting party or war band. More recently, scholars such as Thomas Kavanagh and Hämäläinen have found considerable evidence of a sophisticated if highly decentralised politics. Unlike the rigid hierarchies familiar to ...”

“... grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy rose at 4 a.m. to cultivate his own small patch among a ‘wilderness of moorland farms’. His special pride was a plot of potatoes. He bathed in a burn and caught trout. The pattern of his life, the intimacy with the ground, the eye on the weather, the threats ...”

“... In​ 1889 Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a 72-year-old professor at the Collège de France, wrote a letter to the Lancet in which he reported the effects of injecting himself with guinea pig semen. The results were remarkable. He could once more lift heavy weights, no longer had to hold the banister when going down the stairs and his youthful vigour had returned in other areas too ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or rising from the rubble of General Sherman’s march through the South. In fact, Celebration rose from a swampy lot at the edge of the Magic Kingdom that was used to relocate alligators once they grew too big for the ponds beside the golf courses and theme parks. It was a flourishing wetland of ten thousand acres, which, if left undeveloped, was in ...”

“... collection). Finally, after much coaxing, she persuaded the 60-year-old Philosophe to leave France for the first time in his life and come to Russia to converse with her. Diderot stayed for four months, meeting the monarch each afternoon for mutually improving interviews. More dialogues. Though informally conducted, each conversation had its ...”