“... coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in ...”

“... elections in Austria, and Karl Renner formed a coalition of Social Democrats and members of the Christian Social Party. Otto Bauer, a Social Democrat, was given the ministry of foreign affairs, and asked that Schumpeter should have finance. Another pragmatic Marxist, Rudolf Hilferding, had recommended him; Bauer himself was impressed by Schumpeter’s ...”

“... bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French space and time ...”

“... with those who wanted to be safe accepting they were chained to a higher power. For the delegates, Christian faith is a form of specialness – the backbone of the ‘American exceptionalism’ we would hear about all week – and its lessons seemed clear. It meant that God would protect them, as he protected Trump from the wicked shooter. God was very much in ...”

“... iron to make nails.) Even the armour they wore was made from shiny paper. (In the second part of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe had ridiculed China’s trade, pitiful in comparison with ‘the universal commerce’ of Europe, and its pathetic army, furnished with erratic firearms and powder lacking in strength. What particularly annoyed Defoe in his fiction was ...”

“... Ahmed takes issue with Hodgson and the scholars who followed him – Ira Lapidus, Chase Robinson, Aziz al Azmeh et al. There is no one ‘Islam’, he says; the word is so ambiguous, governing so many variations in religious practice and such a multitude of societies, as to be useless as a term of historical explanation. Instead, he argues, Islam is ...”

“... the queen, to be ‘the most popular of her sex in the ranks of the Doggy people’.Alice Stennard Robinson (née Cornwell) was an Australian gold rush millionaire, nicknamed ‘Princess Midas’ and ‘the Lady of the Nuggets’, who purchased the Sunday Times seemingly on a whim and installed her lover as editor. She also established the Ladies Kennel ...”

“... one.’ Generally even his sourest observations carry some ring of truth: ‘Sir Thomas [Robinson] had been bred in German courts, and was rather restored than naturalised to the genius of that country: he had German honour, loved German politics, and could explain himself as little as if he spoke only German. He might have remained in obscurity, if ...”

“... we found out his real name was David Daniel Kamirsky ... There is one who calls himself Edward G. Robinson. His real name is Emanuel Goldenberg. There is another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas whose name is Melvyn Desselberg. There are others too numerous to mention. They are attacking the Committee for doing its duty to protect this country and ...”

“... or the last remaining source of sustenance is, like the preposterous single footprint that alerts Robinson Crusoe to lethal man-eating others on his island, all the more exciting for his improbability. The theoretical cannibals are so much better to think with than domesticated, actual Armin Meiwes. Catalin Avramescu considers their historical reality an ...”

“... essay ‘The Gods in Exile’ imagines disguised Greek gods wandering disconsolately through the Christian world, and this conceit was picked up by a generation of writers who had turned away from Christianity. They lament the old ‘Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day’, as Swinburne put it in his sorrowful ‘Hymn to ...”

“... commissioning of this holy scene would assist their cause at the Final Judgment. Or in modern, non-Christian terms, the beetle-browed bully receives society’s approval because he bought some fine paintings. But is art such a zero-sum matter? And presumably any such weighing presupposes a possible outcome in which a great genius can also be such a great shit ...”

“... race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever remain a reproach to the Christian nations of Europe. Ireland has no share in this black record. Our country has this proud distinction – freely acknowledged by Jewish writers – of never having resorted to this un-Christian and barbarous treatment ...”

“... a poet’), or Defoe: the new master of a form that will all but replace poetry for a century, as Robinson Crusoe in its extreme shipwrecked mundanity throws away every heroic convention that preceded it. Robinson was born the year after Dryden, 1632. If there is, in the age of Defoe, any way forward for real poets, then it ...”

“... markets of the third quarter of the century, thereby leading to what Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson called informal empire or ‘the imperialism of Free Trade’. Thereafter, Britain’s determination not to copy the other European states and America, by retreating into protective tariffs, is often seen as an enlightened attachment to principle; but it ...”