“... take any part, precisely because I did not wish to give myself the opportunity of displaying what may look like and perhaps is ungenerosity and bad temper.’ The nub of Schumpeter’s criticism, as he wrote in his review of the book, was that in the General Theory Keynes ‘pleads for a definite policy, and on every page the ghost of that policy looks over ...”

“... your word “genius”.’ Joyce was unlikely to be much taken by nature mysticism: what he may have found to admire in Wordsworth was his awareness of the momentousness that can attend the ordinary. Wordsworth could not have written Ulysses, of course, and would not have wished to; but the animating principle of Joyce’s novel, that ordinary events ...”

“... French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our children, will see it again. In Barcelona and Catalonia, this epiphany was released (they wouldn’t have liked the word ‘led’) by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Orwell arrived there in December 1936 to ‘fight fascism’ and walked ...”

“... the Temmler factory, which could now press them at the rate of 833,000 a day. On the night of 10 May the Panzer Group von Kleist, led by 1222 tanks (the largest motorised unit ever assembled), was supplied with twenty thousand Pervitin pills. The tank general Heinz Guderian had convinced Hitler with his daring proposal to concentrate the battalions on a push ...”

“... were quickly integrated into the cosmopolitan community of liberation movements. The Panthers may not have noticed, or perhaps didn’t care, that Algeria itself was a conservative, closed society, that women were not really free, that a form of anti-black racism existed among the population, and that the Algerian establishment’s generosity required ...”

“... three times. He was also extremely good-looking. That much we probably knew, more or less. What may come as a surprise is that he had been appointed equerry to King George as early as 1944, when Margaret was only 14. By then, he had a wife, Rosemary, and a small son. Margaret said, much later, that she really fell in love with him in 1947 when he ...”

“... wife, Maurie, complained that she was snubbed by the local gentry. They were Catholic too, which may have been part of it. Both parents seem to have viewed their daughter as an instrument for social improvement – Carrington took refuge from their ambitions in a vivid imaginative world. One of her earliest surviving notebooks, from 1927, when she was ten ...”

“... She turns back. ‘Murdered?’ she says. The ending is in this beginning. She registers that he may be a killer. Does she believe in his innocence? Not necessarily. Can she handle him? Perhaps. Or can she not handle him – and does that make him her kind of guy? She continues to respond, undaunted. ‘Were you interested in Mr Steele because he’s a ...”

“... This prediction was less on the money: the promised privatisation has now been postponed, and may never materialise. Perhaps it was always a fantasy, but the fact that it was announced in the pages of the Economist gave it the kind of credibility that investors wanted to see. ‘This is a man to do business with,’ the Financial Times declared. ‘MBS ...”

“... number dropped (to 17.2 million). If a single woman is pregnant and decides to have the baby, she may face a considerable fine, and the sum varies in different regions. She may have difficulty registering the baby in the hukou (household registration) system, which is tied to education and social security ...”

“... as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year.) The phrase was used as a way of signalling economic and moral commitment at the same ...”

“... businessman whose brushes with manorial justice were practically routine. His mother’s name may have been Katherine, and her origins can be traced with some close detective work to the Meverell family of the Staffordshire Peaks. The mature Cromwell looked back to his own wild youth, ‘as he himself was wont oftentimes to declare unto Cranmer Archbishop ...”

“... He now believes that ‘these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviours has set.’ What they have ‘to offer’, once leached of the emotional intensity with which it is delivered, may resemble ...”

“... Kirk Douglas ‘in his crueller moments (see Ace in the Hole and Champion)’. Here, the events may be true (he’s at pains to tell us he has fact-checked the incidents with the main cast of agency characters): it’s just Clancy’s responses to them which sometimes seem as if life was imitating MGM. For instance, the book opens with a chase: Clancy is ...”

“... has never tried to see beneath her skirt and asks Him to protect her always from boys or men who may want to do impure things to her. In answer to his prayer he is allowed to see how the man who goes home to the Rockies sometimes makes out through gaps in forested cliffs and beyond tenuous valleys the true country of Idaho where it trembles, faint and ...”