“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sobchak, any more than Putin’s admission that he was a KGB officer (he soon resigned). Putin rose rapidly to become deputy mayor, where he gained a reputation for silent, chilly efficiency. In a period of wild gangsterism and corruption, he was considered clean. Some who knew him think that he suffered from pathological coldness, a deficit of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mackintosh in Glasgow, Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the ...”

“... was genuinely believed to be the national interest.’ ‘I have always thought collusion [with France and Israel, which he denied in the Commons] a red herring – I did not mislead the House of Commons – I certainly did not tell them the whole story.’ The unanswered question, according to Lloyd, was ‘supposing we had reoccupied Egypt, what would we ...”

“... is the direct source of the phrase, but Milton is also drawing on a speech made by the Princess of France in Love’s Labours Lost: ‘Good wits will be jangling; but, gentles, agree/This civil war of wits were much better used/On Navarre’. The word ‘jangling’ is associated in Milton’s imagination with civil war (the phrase ‘jangling ...”

“... which Hayek was working on when he arrived in Cambridge in 1940. The opening scene was set in France in the 1790s, when Napoleon started to dismantle institutions of humanistic education and replace them with schools of engineering and natural science. Napoleon’s grand design prospered, breathing life into the conceptual monster which Hayek referred to ...”

“... moment everything is in proportion; the next, sights brighten, outlines sharpen, the scent of a rose becomes monstrous. Frederica, who by the time of Babel Tower has fled the shock of Stephanie’s death into an isolating and brutal marriage with Nigel, eventually breaks free and makes a new life for herself in London. She reads manuscripts and appears on ...”

“... about the same, a little above three thousand. Two weeks later, when Trump was claiming in the Rose Garden that China and the WHO between them had raised the worldwide caseload by a factor of twenty, the number of dead in China had barely budged: the epidemic there was under control. In the US, more than 23,000 had perished. By the time of Azar’s address ...”

“... wrote also to Georgie, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle which Yeats had bought a year earlier. Georgie, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats: I find her graceful & beautiful, & in her bright picturesque dresses, she will ...”

“... 1915), his first heavyweight novel, and corrected the proofs while serving with the Red Cross in France. There, a few months before Syrie’s pregnancy, he had also met Gerald Haxton, a louche American expatriate who became the most important man in his life. Maugham eventually married Syrie for the child’s sake – their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in ...”