“... by treating people like Drayson and Bellhouse as heroes for creating wealth from knowledge’ – Paul Drayson and Brian Bellhouse are both medical inventors – ‘that Britain will develop a fully fledged entrepreneurial culture,’ Leadbeater puffs, as if Thatcherism had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit ...”

“... sociologists have had reason to ask. On the one hand are those, including the whole of mainstream North American sociology, who go on about their research – using statistics and causal talk, scientificating by validation and the accumulation of findings – who seldom notice that they have been castigated as positivists, and who remember Durkheim as someone ...”

“... not pathetic; virtuel, potential, not virtual; délire, delusion, not delirium; pays nordiques, north European, not nordic, countries; emphase, exaggeration, bombast, not emphasis; primaire, simplistic, not primary; ponctuel, specific not punctual). And what are Jean Paul II (St Peter’s successor) and the ‘Palais ...”

“... Academy was a grudging discretion. Ten years was deemed a decent enough interval in the case of Paul Morand, for example, whose ‘role during the last war’ led to the defeat of his candidacy in 1958: in 1968 he was duly elected to the Academy. The Academy’s refusal of all attempts at reform and renewal has not done it much good: today it is seen by ...”

“... Historicism and Cultural Materialism are enterprises which, as products of our Western European or North American presuppositions, prove to be as blindly culture-specific as the societies they describe.’ He is rightly cheerful about this prospect of his own occultation; it is a fate which, like death, he will share with us all. But he hopes that, unlike most ...”

“... been an issue for the church. Total ostracism was the usual response, accompanied by florid, North Korea-style demonisation. The four uncles and aunts who had chosen not to spend their lives being vile for the Lord were ‘criminally rebellious’, ‘vain and whorish’, ‘an idolatrous witch’, ‘an entitled manipulator’. In 2004 Megan’s beloved ...”

“... Each had a unique character. Still, there was a pattern of increasing violence. Zhytomyr, in north-west Ukraine, saw two pogroms in the space of two months; the town had sustained a brief period of Bolshevik occupation, and local opinion identified Jews – sometimes correctly – with the brutality of the Cheka. But the inhabitants of Zhytomyr conflated ...”

“... the freedom of the press, stating baldly: ‘There is no censorship.’ From left to right, Paul Sethe, Marion Dönhoff, Hans Zehrer. By the mid-1920s Germany had more than four thousand daily or weekly newspapers and another three thousand more specialised periodicals. Every town and city had its own papers, and some of them, such as the Frankfurter ...”

“... in Asia and Africa, but it would not have dreamed of intervening unilaterally in Europe or North America. Despite spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined, and despite enjoying overwhelming technological superiority, American military power is actually quite limited. As Iraq – and to a lesser extent Afghanistan – has ...”

“... his Texas ranch, and gives nicknames to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton ...”

“... the following lines from ‘Algerian Diary’, dated ‘New Year’s Day 1944’ and set in the North African POW camp where Sereni was imprisoned: Over there where from tower to tower agreement leaps in vain now and is thrown back, the who-goes-there of the hour, – just as down here from turret to turret from the heights of the compound Moroccan guards ...”

“... more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than Thompson of Sunderland, however, was Auguste Comte, one of whose books ...”

“... have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’. Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and ...”

“... hinder the growth of that affection. In 1890, Stan Laurel was born in Yorkshire to a girl from the North Riding and a man who made his own greasepaints. But Stan’s father, Arthur Jefferson, did more than that: he was a theatrical entrepreneur and a writer of plays and sketches. Stan grew up in the theatre, making his first stage appearance at the Glasgow ...”

“... you read over the work it’s clear that St Lucia was always a presence even when Walcott was in North America and Europe. He came home when he reached his eighties, and he’s unlikely to leave again except on short trips (the Globe will stage Omeros next month and maybe he’ll get to London). It’s odd, in a world fizzing with insects and furious ...”