“... full of men, typically in pairs, making their way south. Marjorie and Enrico hid people in their warren of a house, as did many of their friends. The threat of the death penalty was ignored – everyone seemed to be hiding someone. The commotion of getting off an overcrowded bus was the distraction that allowed people to vanish into a building without being ...”

“... successes in a carnet de suicidés, Romain preferred direct intervention. A secret door led to a warren of rooms at the back of the house where he intimidated lenders, fobbed off unpaid tradesmen ‘with the small change of hope’, and planned the murders for which he was never convicted. Three years after a distiller ...”

“... paragraph of his magnum opus, The General Theory, published in 1936. This obviously expressed his hope that his own ideas would be disseminated through such a process and in this sort of trajectory. Quoting the passage in 1947, a year after his great rival’s death (though oddly, still employing the present tense), Hayek said that Keynes ‘has never said a ...”

“... iniquity, in the 1770s and 1780s. The chronic insolvency of the East India Company scuppered all hope of redeeming the national debt with tribute from India, and launched the first run of a now all too familiar scenario: Parliament in shock, a government hostage to the City of London, private profit and public loss, fat cats and rogue traders, howls of ...”

“... probably knew nothing of Jarrell’s troubles when he wrote his New York Times review. Let’s hope he didn’t By any standards the piece was pretty nasty. But it was, we must assume, aimed not at a mentally ill 50-year-old but at the friskily cocksure Jarrell who, 20 years earlier, had been American poetry’s most celebrated hatchetman. If certain of ...”

“... who benefited from the dry, pollen-free air (until newcomers planted lawns and trees in the hope of turning the desert into a south-western version of semi-tropical Miami). In the postwar years, Goldwater and his cadre of small businessmen saw their city as a major economic centre of the future, unlikely as that may have seemed. In fact, the jump-start ...”

“... up a chrono that’s very deep.’ ‘What’s a chrono?’ I asked. At that his eyebrows gave up hope for Western liberal democracy. But he explained patiently. What I learned was this. A chronology is one of the basic tools of intelligence analysis, a listing of facts on a given subject in chronological order. The evidence that goes into a chronology is ...”

“... decisions, and it’s an approach that has not vanished even at the start of the 21st century. Warren Buffet – America’s most celebrated and most successful investor – judges, among other things, the people who run the companies he is considering. If he doesn’t like them, he won’t invest, no matter how attractive an opportunity their companies ...”

“... mature achievement as ‘the man who bought the company’ (Remington) because he liked the razor. Warren Avis of the car rental empire is less fortunate in his autobiographical narrative. Take a chance to be first tries to make a case for the special nature of this ordinary Joe. Avis styles himself a real gunslinger (nothing less than ‘the fastest gun in ...”

“... and 2005 as crime dropped; blacks are six times as likely to be in prison as whites – in the hope that the present will come to seem as morally outrageous as the past. The presumption of guilt and danger that burdens blacks, especially black men, has a long history. After slavery comes what the museum calls ‘Era 2: Racial Terror’, characterised by ...”

“... day on our children’s lips Cascade – ’ (His name for the project) ‘ – Will be a word for hope; A word for how we didn’t self-destruct, A word for courage, for the best In our great nation under God, the true Spirit of enterprise, get-up-and-go, can-do; Call me a bleeding heart, an idealist, Call me a renegade Liberal, but my friends I have a hunch ...”

“... a 75-year pile-up of biographies, movies, novels and documentaries. Writers including Robert Penn Warren and Sinclair Lewis (All the King’s Men and It Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character ...”

“... energy. The editing is exemplary and, for what you get, the prices are shockingly low, which I hope indicates that the publishers mean to sell to individuals as well as libraries. An individual who is constrained (or so conditioned to expect books to be cheap as to believe himself constrained) to limit himself to one volume would be wise to pick Volume ...”

“... transformed himself into an Indian, who is unencumbered by family and yet remains the last, best hope for the settlers on the frontier, Natty is – as D.H. Lawrence put it in his Studies in Classic American Literature – an ‘isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white’. (Taciturn and ...”

“... they would hardly have recovered from Ralph yet – as I am sure I haven’t.’ ‘We all … hope it may be the last time we will have to send you congratulations on such an occasion,’ Lady Grant wrote back to her daughter with some impatience after James, number 13. Why, given their intelligence and scientific pragmatism, the Stracheys did not control ...”