“... coffee shops glowing with an occult circle of pale screens and fearful concentration. Why do these digital initiates always look as if the screens hold bad news, as if the power is on the point of shutting down permanently, leaving them disconnected in outer darkness?That coffee sign was a border marker, preparing me for a series of designated smoking ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... was ‘anything but’) taught Streisand independence. No one was going to tell her what to do; her family called her ‘fabrent, which means “on fire” in Yiddish’. She liked sitting under the table and listening to the adults’ conversations. She developed an unexplainable clicking in her ear and refused to eat. Eventually the clicks developed ...”

“... Kennedy’s sleuthing triumph. He had been given the Gagliano in 1928 by Louise Bachiene and Jaap de Graaff, wealthy Dutch admirers of his in London. Soon afterwards, he toured the Netherlands, where he met and married their niece Ada Weevers, with whom he moved to Berlin in 1931. He taught and gave concerts until Hitler came to power, when the couple moved ...”

“... exulted: Sisi and the army took their cue from the people. They had many previous chances to do what they did but they didn’t take them. But once millions of people went out and started chanting for the army to step in, they took their orders from us. The army did not take over power. They were merely a partner in the democratic change we were ...”

“... that instead of pointing out that this British values stuff is a crock of nonsense, schools do their best to comply. One school near where I live in South-East London has an intake of British, African, African-Caribbean, European and Asian children: it put up an enormous Union flag mural, with ‘Democracy, the Great British Value’, emblazoned on ...”

“... to spin around me. People wandered by. The place was a madhouse of bleeping barcodes. ‘How do you like it?’ one of them asked. I gulped it down and focused my eyes. ‘It tastes like an English field,’ I said.The store manager guided me to the cut flowers. ‘We are the UK’s largest flower sellers,’ he told me, ‘the biggest year on year ...”

“... the time, for most social purposes, nine-tenths of any group can ignore the remainder. They will do so all the more easily when their statistical superiority is amplified by advantage in other domains, such as ownership, social class, cultural or military achievement. The resultant hegemony appears more natural to those exerting it than to whoever is in its ...”

“... system, organisations such as further education colleges, charities and for-profit companies which do not at present have an allocation of places, but which would obtain them from this pool by undercutting universities. Students recruited from this pool by for-profit providers will be eligible for government-backed loans, so that public finance will help to ...”

“... hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and left. Alan’s languid phone calls were often to do with professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford ...”

“... coal-based energy as a key condition of the Industrial Revolution, a notion others have sought to do away with altogether. But none has seriously shaken Hobsbawm’s case for the importance of the imperial framework. On the other hand, when we come to the second major epoch of industrial expansion, the global take-off of the 1850s that is the starting point ...”

“... and on football. He will be missed more than we can say.Where shall we begin? How far back do you want to go?Why don’t we go back to the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your father was an engineer?Yes. A civil engineer, built sewers, I ...”

“... it goes, that increasing awareness among scholars of feminist citational practice has something to do with the current prominence of both. Yes, women do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking ...”

“... not very happily in the late 1920s, a pretty terrible political poet, but also a lion-tamer (he’d joined the circus at 17) who cured Lenin’s dog when he was in Russia as a delegate at the Second Congress of the Third International in 1920. My mother remembers his signed photograph of Lenin, addressed to ‘comrade Clarke’. I was struck, too, by another ...”

“... Pelosi doesn’t talk about it. Nancy Pelosi is a disaster, OK? She’s a disaster and let her do what she wants … I’ll tell you her name, it’s Nervous Nancy because she’s a nervous wreck.’ Fifteen other heads of state dutifully sign the D-Day Proclamation at the bottom, but the president scrawls his name ...”