“... included von Neumann, the physicist Eugene Wigner, the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the novelist Arthur Koestler. Michael attended the Minta, qualified as a physician, served as a military doctor during the war, and, having had himself baptised, married a Catholic. (Polanyi’s maternal grandfather had been the chief rabbi of Vilna, so that was a rapid ...”

“... that they would free their slaves as soon as they won independence. Take the case of Lt Col. Arthur Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards. An opponent of slavery, Fremantle initially supported the North but was repelled by Seward’s early bombast and soon developed a fascination with the rebel cause. He applied for leave of absence to visit the scenes of ...”

“... militance of the Scottish labour movement was fatally undermined by the hubris of the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, forcing the Scottish left ‘to look to the nationalists as a bulwark against “English” politics’.At its root, Lloyd argues, the case for independence relies ‘on seeing England, or Englishness, or the English, as malign influences on the ...”

“... epistolary tribute:Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophis IV in profile … If you consider what the above Names have severally done for me, you will know what you are doing. And you have fixed my Life ...”

“... to get so much publicity, and the BBC was considering a new schedule which pitched stars such as Arthur Askey, Gracie Fields or George Formby against Joyce. Eventually, the Corporation chose Norman Birkett, a well-known lawyer, who began to make weekly broadcasts at the same hour as Haw-Haw. Goebbels was exultant: ‘They want to put somebody up to talk ...”

“... radical stance (Greenblatt’s powerful essay, ‘Paper Bullets’, would be a case in point), do little to dislodge the intellectual bases of more conventional criticism: they merely reverse them. Stress on the whole Tudor Myth, concern with the source materials Shakespeare took from contemporary historians, whether primarily ‘for’ the Prince or ...”

“... ran a shuttle to Milan, where Songangol staff were offered technical training. The US consultant Arthur D. Little was hired to show the company’s managers around the energy markets and help them draw up contracts. Marc Rich, the controversial trader who founded Glencore – and cut oil deals with Iran at the time of the ...”

“... the spontaneous peaceful order that would result from maximum liberation of the market – bore little resemblance to actually existing capitalism. Since the crash, behavioural economics has generated much of the excitement in the field, but it too is better equipped to make sense of individual economic actors than of the mutually determining trajectories ...”

“... profit from a production line by outsourcing it to wherever it’s cheapest and breaking it into little bits. But the left in Britain had ‘lost touch with change and the world outside itself’, and was fighting new battles ‘on old ground … on the basis of an old analysis’. ‘It was akin to deploying the cavalry against the tanks.’It’s my bad ...”

“... Schwartz wrote to Laughlin, ‘they appear to regard sex as a form of violent exercise a little less serious than tennis.’ Berryman remembered being at their house one evening when Gertrude showed her husband a piece she was writing for Partisan Review: ‘He pointed out the number of words beginning with “ex-” and remarked, “Freud could make ...”

“... he said as he took me on a tour of his old clients. ‘Sometimes they brought you water in little tiny bottles and little old ladies could carry that. But sometimes they brought five-litre bottles that little old ladies had no chance of carrying.’ He introduced me to Gladys ...”

“... self-education, with Coates constantly summoning himself to fresh modes of thinking. Very little in his book will be unfamiliar to readers of histories of American slavery and the mounting scholarship on the new Jim Crow. Coates, who claimed in 2013 to be ‘not a radical’, now says he has been ‘radicalised’, and as a black writer in an ...”

“... they fix an image once and for all. Far from being illustrations, they have a quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from ...”

“... arrived, as did another musician for Wilde. Gide held in his ‘bare arms that perfect, wild little body, so dark, so ardent, so lascivious … After Mohammed had left me, I remained for a long time in a state of quivering jubilation … Since then, whenever I have sought pleasure, it is the memory of that night I have pursued.’ Gide subsequently met ...”

“... herself she exacerbated the frictions of Cold War. Like George Kennan, with whom she otherwise has little in common, she slipped ideas into the policy-making bloodstream, where they took on a life of their own. Her notions about the way Russian child development shaped Soviet politics only emboldened American anti-communists to dismiss cultural analysis ...”