“... its farms and its grain and commodity exchanges, has receded in importance as the financial and service centres, in New York and California, rise and fall with Gatsby-like flair. Those frightening actualities of foreign provenance – trade deficits, Aids, terrorism, Soviet evil, immigrants – have recently overtaken the society as a whole, reduced its ...”

“... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...”

“... the Tata conglomerate from its origins in 19th-century trade to its primacy in the manufacturing, service and trade sectors in postcolonial India, Raianu paints a more ambiguous portrait. The business was started by Nusserwanji Tata, the son of a revenue clerk in Bombay. He was a Parsi – Zoroastrians whose ancestors migrated to India from the Persian Gulf ...”

“... 1600, political offices were usually seen as the property of the monarch, bestowed as a reward for service. Many offices were unpaid, but most conferred social capital of various kinds and also carried the expectation of profit, to be obtained through the collection of fees and opportunities for patronage.The aim of Mark Knights’s book is to explain why ...”

“... the pain of others. They are, rather, about the complete eradication of the self in the service of the afflicted, who, precisely because of their affliction, have already had their own subjectivity obliterated. Weil’s only loving interlocutor is God.What about​ Weil’s ideas? There is no disputing their importance. Her thinking about ...”

“... engaged in these efforts later became prominent members of the new Irish state’s diplomatic service. Joe Walshe, for example, who was Secretary of the Department of External Affairs from 1922 until 1946; Michael MacWhite, who had served in the French Foreign Legion during the Great War and was Irish Permanent Representative to the League of Nations in ...”

“... Sun. (At least this was Rowland’s version of what was happening – Murdoch has denied it.) Robert Maxwell is trying to buy a 10 per cent share in Fleet Holdings from the, Australian tycoon Robert Holmes a Court for £15.4 million, while another bidder – it’s not clear whether or not he is a rival to Maxwell ...”

“... Robert Burns wrote about art, friendship, religion, animals, drink, marriage and love. The First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land ...”

“... The nation-state had been forged (most notably by Bismarck in Germany) to place the state in the service of the nation, and was at root a welfare state, in the sense that its legitimacy depended on its ability to better the welfare of its citizens. The Long War was fought between the proponents of what were initially three different visions of national ...”

“... of illness. She grew up in Milwaukee, where her maternal grandfather owned a department store (Robert Kanigel describes him as ‘a force in the local Jewish community and a major philanthropist’). Her mother thought the Californian climate would help Marian recover from Spanish flu – and also wanted to enrol at the university herself. Marian’s ...”

“... the rain. Unfair that we neither know nor care that the author of ‘O Worship the King’ was Robert Grant (1785-1838). Grant’s virtual anonymity is the clearest proof that he has entered into the folk-memory, his verses remembered or half-remembered by those who neither know nor care – nor need they – what it is they remember. And who can ...”

“... were. In December 1763, Wilkes himself was awarded £1000 against the undersecretary of state, Robert Wood, for trespass to his house and papers; and much later, in 1769, he secured judgment for four times that sum against Lord Halifax personally for trespass and false imprisonment. In neither case did the defendant’s counsel try to argue that office as ...”

“... and harder to do without. (When I googled A Very British Coup, the first result was an article by Robert Peston describing the recent attempt by Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn and Oliver Letwin to seize parliamentary control of the Brexit process. The headline read: ‘A very British coup against the PM’.) The second thing is Jeremy Corbyn. The book is now ...”

“... and their keepers, fostering community spirit. Other such connections come from the ‘popular service magic’ once carried out by the ‘cunning folk of English tradition’, connected to a widespread belief in supernatural beings such as fairies and elves. None of this, however, looks anything like a religion, a distinct ‘paganism’. Such a thing ...”

“... on piloti above the surviving houses. A succession of streets ends incoherently in blind walls and service roads. Completeness is sacrificed to the demands of traffic, a bogus god even in those days. In a tunnel beneath the wretched road, that which has been lost is commemorated by murals. But the amputations are irreversible.Rackham’s hands were tied, of ...”