“... Laura Curtis’s language strikes one as extravagant: she is importing a Romantic sublime or William Goldingesque apocalypticism into Defoe’s sober scene. Then what about the following? ‘In Chapter Two, I traced two tendencies in Robinson Crusoe and in A Journal of the Plague Year that conflict with Defoe’s compulsion to construct in his writing an ...”

“... opportunities for the ambitious and resourceful. At the start of the century, only one in ten white men worked for someone else. As late as 1860, when Lincoln was touting the promise of upward mobility for all, only 40 per cent worked for wages. Ironically, the Civil War – America’s great battle cry of freedom – wrecked the republican idyll. The ...”

“... else, a consummate salesman. He appears on Palantir’s earnings calls dressed in standard-issue white T-shirts and with a quasi-punk haircut. He rattles off quarterly earnings and throws out jargon like ‘ontology’ and ‘user-centred machine learning’ as if Palantir invented them. (Object-oriented ontology was already in vogue in the 1990s with the ...”

“... than many sentimental retrospectives allow. But now it is the Republican Party which shelters the white supremacists and religious bigots. Gingrich didn’t really hate the Sixties. But for tactical reasons, he needs the people who did. Much of this book is taken up with a restatement of the Contract with America on which the GOP took both Houses in ...”

“... McCarthy, whose first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1966, but we continue to ignore William Eastlake, who worked (Go in Beauty and Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses) a parallel seam with equal distinction. To be read, a player, a part of the buzz, you need to be given away with copies of Esquire magazine. (McCarthy was an established ...”

“... of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of ...”

“... with any aspect of foreign policy … I can confirm that there have never been, whether in White House talks, in telegrams, in ambassadorial approaches, or even on the hot line, any attempts to link Vietnam with economic or monetary co-operation. In a cabinet meeting in February 1966 Wilson again denied the link, and Richard Crossman, the minister of ...”

“... its competence – was ‘born unfree’. Staggering in its own way is the acute perception of Sir William Wade, who held chairs in law at both Oxford and Cambridge, that the Union was originally understood to be the ‘fundamental law’ of the new British state, but ‘the Treaty was made too early, and the argument has been raised too late, for this ...”

“... initiation ceremony in New Mexico, I noticed the woman next to me run her fingers down the smooth white laminated wall, clearly to sample its texture and identify what it was made of. She made me realise that nothing in the show can be touched, a kind of erotic prohibition that matches McQueen’s dominant note. But there was something so knowledgeable in the ...”

“... for bombing victims. He also effected the demolition of many homes to make way for the bloated white elephant of Germania, Hitler’s new capital. These clearances were paltry put beside the consequences of his work on concentration camps. He had no part in running them but it was part of his brief to get them built, to quarry and fire the materials. He ...”

“... dropsy. There were further indignities. In 1810, a menagerie owner called Mr Brookes imported a ‘white camel’ to Britain. The beast was a ‘novelty’ in London, but Brookes wanted it to be ‘still more novel’ and ‘caused it to be artificially spotted and produced it to the public as a camelopard’. (The fraud was discovered by some ‘scientific ...”

“... the surplus population’. But Malthus was not what Wilson supposes: he criticised utopians like William Godwin for ignoring the risks of untrammelled population growth, but rather than advocating acquiescence in death by famine, he insisted that ‘sufficient yet remains to be done … to animate us to the most unremitted exertion.’ Wilson is ...”

“... but some people worried that Germany would lash out in revenge. One morning, on the Isle of Dogs, William Regan heard a small plane fly over and get shot down, causing a surprisingly large explosion. The same thing happened to another plane, and another. ‘I said to Alf that the gunners were on form, three over, three down. Hardly credible. We began to ...”

“... work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris’s mind reel, publishers quail. But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the ...”

“... professed humanism, but by its results. The resemblance between Steiner’s proposals and those of William Bennett, Alan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch should therefore give us pause. For all these figures, the proper response to deconstructive criticism, the opening of the literary canon and the proliferation of aesthetic commentary is to draw back into a dream of an ...”