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“... politics at the moment seem curiously provisional. The failures of the present government are so gross and obvious that hardly anyone, even its nominal supporters, attempts to defend it ideologically. Yet at the same time hardly anyone believes that Labour will really win the next election, or that it could cope even if it did. There is also a strong sense ...”

“... of the Committee of Public Safety to the Army of the Rhine in the winter of 1793-94: J.P. Gross, Saint-Just, sa Politique et ses Missions (1976). The third was a biography, drawing on its author’s doctorat d’état, which greatly extended knowledge of the political and economic life of the little country town of Blérancourt in Picardy in which ...”

“... registers: ‘Successful shade, accept my hand in fraternal contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes, grandson of the minister of the Bunyan chapel at Bedford, was born into a religious tradition that for two hundred years had stopped its ears against the blandishments of Mr Worldly Wiseman and sought only the Celestial City of Eternal Life. The City was to be found, as all readers of Pilgrim’s Progress knew, not by piety or public-spiritedness or good works or moral behaviour, but by that indefinable state of inner consciousness known as Salvation by Faith ...”

“... to marry Lucy Snowe? Or was he drowned? Charlotte Brontë produces a subtle variation on the gross Thackerayan formula. The ‘kind heart’ and ‘sunny imagination’ is allowed to conceive ‘the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror. Let them picture union and happy succeeding life.’ But Lucy Snowe is being her own Thackeray. The end ...”

“... points and a fourth hanging from one of the rubies. It was commissioned as a shoulder-clasp by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, ‘years before his murder’ in 1467, and passed through various hands, including those of Elizabeth I – she can be seen wearing the jewel in the ‘Ermine Portrait’ that hangs in Hatfield House – until it was finally ...”

“... currency, remoteness from markets, an apparently irrepressible birth-rate, poor infrastructure, gross disparities in living standards – one could go on. The point is not to draw facile comparisons, but to try and show how economic underdevelopment and nationalist ideology still dominate Irish political culture in ways which European socialists find hard ...”

“... Circle, Warner Brothers acquired the film rights for a million dollars (plus a percentage of the gross), and the novelist’s agent reported himself confident that American paperback rights would fetch in excess of two million dollars. The Devil’s Alternative, when it existed only as a synopsis circulating the Frankfurt Book Fair, earned a record £250,000 ...”

“... the refuseniks have been treated is not only an infringement of their human rights: it is also a gross violation of the traditions of scientific practice. The majority of Russian scientists probably understand this well enough and do what they can to help the victims, but the Khalatnikovs and Gorkovs who participate actively in these offences should no ...”

“... it made womanhood a lightning rod for attitudes to capitalist modernity. What Adam Smith’s pupil John Millar decried as the ‘habits of avarice’ of ‘polished nations’ generated much moral disquiet in 18th-century Britain. People fretted about ostentation and epicureanism, about the emasculation of manners and morals by ‘unmanly ...”

“... He had the imperial instincts in abundance. His misfortune was that it was the time of the gross military disasters of Majuba Hill and Isandhlwana, with the Boers waiting to snatch the lands the Zulus claimed. Britain could not, or would not, hold on to the Transvaal. Disenchanted, the young adventurer decided that the time had come to make money out ...”

“... Is the Gross Domestic Product real? How about the unemployment rate? Or the population of the United Kingdom? These are entities that hover between the realms of the invented and the discovered. On the one hand, they are creatures of classification and calculation, of conventions of coding, modelling and sampling ...”

“... Birmingham, early this century, most of the place Fisher grew up in had been replaced by a gross and incoherent jumble of pedestrian malls and outsize, hideous emporia: the favoured urban renewal mode of the era. The jewellery district where Fisher’s father worked does remain much as it probably appeared in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and ...”

“... world, like the Trump business world,’ Wolff says, ‘you focused on the bragging rights of gross rather than the harsher reality of net.’ The question was never what you could do with what you were left with, it was always what you could insist you were owed in the first place. One number that Trump fixated on was 66 million. He had been told by the ...”