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“... from the age of 18 you will, on average, be 700,000 years old before you win the jackpot, and if Richard Branson succeeds in his bid for the People’s Lottery you’re more likely to be a million. The newsagent in question is on Willesden High Road, where every shop that isn’t a newsagent is a takeaway. The streets of low-rise housing go on for ever and ...”

“... There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is still maintained here, at St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. The first thing you notice is an exotic Rumanian screen, for St Dunstan’s is much used by members of a Rumanian Church in communion with the Church of England ...”

“... 1915. Almost the entire naval force set out to overwhelm the Turkish guns and clear the mines by weight of shell and speed of action. Failure was total; not a single mine was swept. The Turkish forts and mobile howitzers were not put out of action, and one third of the naval force was sunk or so severely damaged that it had to be withdrawn. By any sensible ...”

“... Grandma Lu, her father’s mother, and she doesn’t need to be blamed outright to feel punished.Richard Beard’s extraordinary memoir of 2017, The Day That Went Missing, has the same starting point, a brother drowning, apparently within reach of a sibling unable to help. Richard was eleven in 1978, Nicky nine. They were ...”

“... unnaturally large, with their heads reaching nearly up to the ceiling, as the British sculptor Richard Deacon showed us in photographs of visitors to the labyrinth of tiny tunnels which run under the city of Chicago. The tunnel becomes claustrophobic, oppressive, odd. On the other hand, if the tunnel is very large, it becomes ...”

“... rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s ...”

“... Emerson, more or less proposes this connection between poetry and pragmatism, but it was left to Richard Rorty to argue for it in a passionate and sustained manner, as he does in essays printed in these pages in 1986 and, somewhat revised, in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. The style of Pragmatism is in itself sufficiently poetic to have made many ...”

“... on the shop floor. They conclude that this interpretation was largely valid, though insufficient weight was given to the policies of employers and governments. The book’s overwhelming concern, however, is the traditional preoccupation with collective-bargaining institutions shared by almost all industrial-relations academics. The general patterns of ...”

“... boiled in it’. His final entry, on 6 April 1910, reads: ‘Last night, I tried to get up. Dead weight. A leg hanging outside. Then a trickle running down my leg. I let it reach my heel before I make up my mind not to bother. It will dry in the sheets, the way it did long ago, when I was Poil de carotte.’ A ginger style, gingerly reaching for a ...”

“... survive, and which those who did took years to overcome. The book does not, perhaps, give enough weight to the feelings of nationalism that imbued so many Germans, especially in the officer corps; it was more than a mere excuse when they claimed they were fighting for Germany, to protect German civilisation against the Bolshevik hordes. The effects of ...”

“... the Battle of France. This war is a world war.’ The global French empire could still throw its weight into the struggle: ‘The flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ Pétain, whose authoritarian government had set about destroying the liberal institutions of the Third Republic and inaugurating a regime of ...”

“... a Spanish one. All favour deciduous forests, where they grow up to two metres long and 200 kg in weight. The size of the boar and his environment are intimately connected. An early 20th-century huntsman advises: ‘Do not confuse cover with food. The latter comes first every time … In a sugarcane country as long as the cane is up all the pig will be in ...”

“... from the passage above; but Keynes had ‘never said a truer thing’. Here is the theme of Richard Cockett’s study, Thinking the Unthinkable, which has seized on a superb subject. Using archival and oral sources to supplement the published record, it traces the activities of a number of intellectual pressure groups, or think-tanks, in proselytising ...”

“... of which conflict with each other, so that it is hardly surprising that some of them sag under the weight of it all. At the same time, their clients become more critical, more hostile to authority and less manipulable. We expect our schools to turn out pupils who are literate and numerate. We expect them to give their pupils some experience and understanding ...”

“... poems, splendid though they may be, are in need of corrective piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest drunk at the Garrick, and Zachary Leader’s biography wasn’t ...”