“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”

“... by the Tory life peer Dido Harding, herself a former McKinsey consultant. Harding’s husband, John Penrose, another former McKinsey consultant and a Tory MP, was at the time the ‘anti-corruption champion’ at the Home Office. During the pandemic, he hit the headlines for trying to absolve Owen Paterson, a fellow Tory MP, who had improperly lobbied on ...”

“... all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year before Gilbert set sail and now in the British Library, shows a rich mixture of strip-fields, commons and orchards, as well as the large number of fields already enclosed by the landowner and ...”

“... with economists talking about the nature of money, starting with a fascinating paper by Milton Friedman, ‘The Island of Stone Money’, published in 1991. There’s a particularly good retelling of the story by Felix Martin in his 2013 book Money: The Unauthorised Biography. Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do ...”

“... a rapid modernisation along Western lines. Zhu is too independent-minded to look up to Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the godfathers of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, who became popular in China in the 1980s. He has no time either for the neo-Confucianist and neo-authoritarian intellectuals who periodically offer to fill the ideological vacuum of the ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

“... is enshrouded in seventy years of mythologising, but no less impressive for that. As John D. Kelly has emphasised, a Singaporean cultural identity was forged within a decade: Malays in Singapore went overnight from being the Bumiputera – the chosen sons of the soil – to a minority; Indians had to forget memories of their prowess in the Indian ...”

“... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...”

“... of an allusive dedication (but to whom?) or an introductory quotation from my favourite poem by John Donne, rehearsing the terms of restrained self-promotion in which to couch the perfect blurb. I was relieved to find that reflections of this nature still achieved a satisfactory standard of consecutive coherence as far as they went, but depressed to ...”

“... half an hour to climb twenty storeys to the roof, and four hours to engulf the building. As Danny Friedman, one of the lawyers representing the survivors, said towards the end of the inquiry: ‘We are still in the era of the rolled-back state and Grenfell is one of its greatest failings. The centre of government – particularly the ministries of everyday ...”

“... were incompatible with Western values. There, Huntington and Kristol were needed to fortify Friedman and Hayek. With this combination of neoliberal and neoconservative ammunition, Bolkestein did battle within the VVD too, catching the tide of a New Right that swelled a season later than in the Anglosphere, generating Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders as ...”