“... village of Mont Pèlerin, with Hayek guiding some forty participants – including an ambitious young American called Milton Friedman – through a long agenda, under the wary gaze of Ludwig von Mises. They agreed to create a permanent organisation called the Mont Pelerin Society, dedicated to the proposition that a ‘free society’ depends on ...”

“... of the duke of Saxony, but reserves a special half-contemptuous pity for ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England’. He is, admittedly, good-looking, but has no proper national dress, wearing instead a German bonnet, an Italian doublet and French hose. Despite this outfit he is fatally parochial, the monoglot speaker of an obscure offshore language no ...”

“... another level of meaning, which is generally thought to have been added to the words in 1725, when Francis Hutcheson invented the phrase ‘greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’, later adapted by Bentham. The words, in Milton’s usage, have a general, public application which speaks for his unrelenting social activism. They are touched or toughened ...”

“... classical German Bildungsroman, the novel of initiation and development, in the course of which a young hero is led from adolescent self-absorption and egocentricity on the margins of the social world through a variety of instructive experiences – often a mixture of the erotic and the aesthetic – to a state of adulthood and responsibility at the centre of ...”

“... emerge. Some commentators have elected Fred Coneybeer, the horse-collar-maker of North Adelaide, a young family man and trade-unionist, the hero of Australians: 1888. Fred survives because his voluminous, ill-spelt diary is extant in the South Australian Archives. He was a meticulous chap, fond of saying ‘you bet’ and ‘no mistake’; he saved up to take ...”

“... as the protector and perhaps even educator of his scholarly stepdaughter. The other child, John Francis, became a student at Ingolstadt, but died there in 1600, aged about twenty. After this brief excursion into the shadowy reality behind the legend of Edward Kelley, I turn to the no less shadowy circumstances of his last years. The exact reason for ...”

“... difference. ‘Maam can borrow up to six books.’ ‘Six? Heavens!’ Meanwhile the ginger-haired young man had made his choice and given his book to the librarian to stamp. Still playing for time the Queen picked it up. ‘What have you chosen, Mr Seakins?’ expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... Everyone is in high spirits. Among those chattering girlishly as spring rolls and won ton arrive: Young but already world-famous deconstructionist literary critic, long involved in a lesbian relationship with an older professor at Yale. Somewhat mannish, chain-smoking medievalist of mysterious inclinations, with whom Famous ...”

“... writes, and despite his desire to feel what the poor feel, ‘there is a hauteur about him.’ The young Zbig was long on language skills, short on introspection. As a PhD candidate at Harvard, ‘he would bludgeon, set traps, ambush and trip up. His manner, which did little to disguise that he thought he was cleverer than most people, left many of his ...”

“... over the broken ground. Here and there were captured enemy, or ‘suspects’ at least, wiry young men in sandals and shabby black work-clothes (or uniforms?), some wounded and bandaged, others sullenly unhurt, their arms tied tightly behind their backs. The ones I saw were being guarded, not by Americans, but by brown-skinned ARVN soldiers, men of their ...”

“... That book is fused with my being in a way that happens only with things encountered when one is young and growing like one of our hero’s magic trees. Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome (to use a word from J.R.R.’s special vocabulary), it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something ...”

“... and so on. Of her rash on Sunday the SI investigator said to us: ‘This is about a rash in a young woman who was profoundly unwell, had sepsis that was unexplained, high fever, low blood pressure, racing heart – in context, those things by themselves are enough for admission to a high dependency facility. The rash on top of that … just goes to ...”

“... worked, and my grandparents worked before that, and where I spent a great deal of time when I was young.It was strange, being able to imagine the rooms in which Beegan had lived – or, more accurately, since I never went into a locked ward when I was a child, the corridors he walked to get from the ward to the art studio and back. I remembered those ...”

“... reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour. Tears of joy? Relief? Despair? The book he is ...”