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“... had starved to death in every village.’ The economist Hu Angang spent seven years on the north-east border with Siberia, and as a driller in a prospecting team in northern China. He often travelled to remote villages in mountainous areas: Witnessing their absolute poverty, I became acutely conscious of the degree of China’s backwardness, and was ...”

“... all, association football. So it is not surprising that what are generally accepted as the major North American contributions to the high culture of our century are rooted in popular and – the US being what it is – commercial entertainment: films and the music shaped by jazz. There is a notable difference between Hollywood and Forty-Second ...”

“... of the Burgos junta did. They rested their case on the Indians’ own nature. They began from John Mair, a Scot at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, who had himself begun from Aristotle. Arguing against the more cautious theologians that Christian doctrine could not be at odds with the ‘true philosophy’, even if that philosophy had been proposed by a ...”

“... Do we really need or want to be told about life’s beauties and terrors by a couple of smart-arse North American young men? Would the truth be any easier to handle from the traditional wise old bird? Miss Wyoming is neither Coupland’s best work – that would be Girlfriend in a Coma, bits of Microserfs (1995), Generation X – nor by any means his worst ...”

“... other historical documents. Probably inspired by Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), and by John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer in the same year as well as the first two volumes of his USA trilogy (1930 and 1932), it was written at a time when there was a preoccupation with telling the ‘American story’ and the conviction that some kind of ...”

“... no difficulty imagining that I was imprisoned with my ladies-in-waiting in a damp castle in the North of England, depressed and stripped of all my power, with only memories to treasure. Unlike Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.Since her death in 1587, Mary Stuart has caused strange stirrings and vehement imaginings in those ...”

“... anecdotes of heroic patriotism, Scouting for Boys is packed with advice about how to find north without a compass, tie a clove hitch, cut down a tree, build a camp fire, bake bread, distinguish a wagtail from a woodpecker or a sycamore from a spanish chestnut, track anything from an emu to a bicycle ‘on a hard macadam road’, fly the Union flag the ...”

“... But this was no ordinary liquidation. With estates in Campania, Sicily, France, Spain, Britain and North Africa, their teenage marriage had joined two of the wealthiest dynasties in the western Mediterranean. The early deaths of two children only strengthened their resolve to become chaste. Outright rejection of family life was followed by the deliberate ...”

“... bursaries, but his advisers also wanted evidence of skill. One of them, however, suggested he see John Reed. Reed was a solicitor, interested in Modernism. He lived with his wife Sunday in a house called Heide, in Heidelberg, a semi-rural community outside Melbourne – it had given its name to the Heidelberg School of Australian painters in the late 19th ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... leprechauns spin on their pointed hats, he inserts the scholarly reservation: ‘but only in the north-eastern counties’. Is Yeats here sending up the reader, the folklorists, or mocking his own relentlessly mythopoeic mind? Or is he sending up nobody at all? A poet who literally lives in one of his own symbols, a half-ruined tower in County Galway, is ...”

“... 1773, after a 13-month voyage from Britain, the sloops Resolution and Adventure arrived on the north coast of Tahiti. For some on board, including their captain, James Cook, this was a return visit to the Pacific haven they called ‘King George’s Island’. The British were there, among other reasons, to check the performance of a small jewelled ...”

“... complexity of the mathematics involved in derivatives can’t be exaggerated. This was the reason John Meriwether, a famous bond trader, employed Myron Scholes – of the Scholes-Black equation – and the man with whom Scholes shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Merton, to be directors and co-founders of his new hedge fund Long-Term Capital ...”

“... the manuscript was copied in a dialect of Middle English specific to the South-East Cheshire and North-East Staffordshire border. (The poet’s dialect is thought to be from a little further south.) This North-West Midlands version of Middle English is a different lexical cocktail to Chaucer’s London English. Chaucer’s ...”