“... version he goes to his death with the words ‘Floreat Etona!’ on his lips (as, one imagines, Simon Mann would have done if things had gone badly for him in Equatorial Guinea). True, Hook could have been an oik trying to make an impression, but at least he had the Latin, and in swordsmanship he fought and died by the rules. Some of Peter Leeson’s ...”

“... and convictions often carried the death sentence. An addendum to the law, setting a fixed price called the General Maximum for food staples, dealt equally harshly with price-gougers. Initially formulated as a response to the journée of 5 September – when sans-culottes again invaded the Convention, this time ...”

“... There, he was active both in the fur trade and as an author. In June 1650 his book The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption was published in London. Described by Gaskill as a ‘bracingly rational’ and ‘intensely heretical’ work, it was condemned in Boston for challenging Calvinist orthodoxy and burned by the hangman. Life in Springfield was hard: a ...”

“... with horsepower in Germany but with the age and sex of the driver in the United States, set the price of policies and are the foundation of vast fortunes for insurance companies. The categories of national labour statistics are only approximately translatable, even among the homogenised economies of the European Community: to be a Beamter or cadre or ...”

“... to Dorothea. She was compliant enough to marry the kindly but, to her mind, boring Jewish banker Simon Veit, whom her father had chosen for her in the traditional style. But she shaped her married life into anything but traditional contours. Consistent with her brains and her aspirations, she founded a reading society that was the prototype of her later ...”

“... CCGs were provided with Commissioning Support Units run by private companies including KPMG, Price Waterhouse Cooper, McKinsey and Optum, the UK subsidiary of United Health. In practice, these companies now run the franchising of NHS services.A key part of the 2012 Act, to which McKinsey was a significant contributor, was the abolition of the health ...”

“... as gatekeeper for the commercial publisher, keeping his corridors clear of unwanted petitioners. Simon and Schuster (motto: ‘there’s no such thing as a good book that doesn’t sell’) offer the following typical disincentive to intending authors: All unsolicited manuscripts will be returned. Only manuscripts submitted by agents or recommended to us by ...”

“... word​ for ‘submerged’ is untergetaucht; it’s also the original title of Marie Jalowicz Simon’s memoir, which has been published in English as Gone to Ground. The term has come to be used of the 15,000 or so Jews who attempted to remain undiscovered in Nazi Germany during the war – they called themselves ‘U-Boats’. Half of them were in ...”

“... openly in France, and Paris had become the undisputed scientific capital of the world. Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique céleste, which described the origins and motions of the solar system in five volumes without once mentioning God, could never have been published in Britain. Mary Somerville’s On the Connection of the Physical Sciences ...”

“... strictly necessary: the way the placenta and umbilical cord were disposed of after his birth; the price of his father’s wedding suit (£12). After his chronicle of McLaren’s early years, Gorman’s account of punk – ‘the series of events that have become familiar in the retelling of the Pistols story down the decades’ – lacks zest. But then come ...”

“... never effectively protected farmers in peacetime. Not in 1846, not in 1879, not in 1921, when the price guarantees imposed in 1917 were swept away by the Tory-dominated coalition (this was known for years afterwards as the ‘great betrayal’). The Tories on that occasion included Stanley Baldwin, soon to be prime minister and a passionate countryman (though ...”

“... many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that train. But the theatrical grandeur of its arrival always alters my sense of my surroundings, as if a door had opened, offering a glimpse of an ...”

“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... usual logical systems, so that we would not be able to say as much if we spoke only Formalese. The price of seeing ourselves in these restricted ways is that what we see is no longer ourselves, but only some desiccated residue. On the other hand, if we remove the mind from the scientific domain completely, as the second view suggests, regarding ourselves as ...”

“... its revenue, the company was vested in trustees. But the press as a whole had no such luck. As Simon Jenkins has reminded us, the great proprietors bought and sold their newspapers for power, prestige and, they hoped, money. The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer ...”