“... The novel has had very bad reviews and quite a lot of publicity, the latter largely because Simon and Schuster first paid a great deal of money for it, then dropped it after some people who worked there objected to passages which described women being tortured and murdered. The chief technical problem facing Ellis was that of imagining a plausible ...”

“... for Mills & Boon, initially published under a pseudonym, and a less successful medieval one, Simon the Coldheart, as well as a contemporary novel, Instead of the Thorn, about a sheltered young woman so horrified by the prospect of sleeping with her new husband that she runs away from him and must spend the rest of the book trying to reconcile herself to ...”

“... plausibility, and the work of such historians as Rudolph Meyer, Richard Popkin, Margaret Jacob and Simon Schaffer tends broadly to support it: the bloody wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries appeared as a crisis in the authority and unity of knowledge; the thinking classes reckoned that peace could be secured and guaranteed only when means were ...”

“... 2030’, a formidable project aimed at weaning the kingdom off hydrocarbons at a time when the price of oil hovers at less than $50 a barrel, driven down by the fracking revolution in the US and the falling off in global demand. Oil won’t sustain the Saudi economy for ever, and MBS’s programme – developed with considerable input from McKinsey – is ...”

“... in more ways than one. The atmosphere was liberal and he made life-long friends there, including Simon Bussy and Albert Marquet. Matisse the art student was rowdier and unrulier than his later respectability would suggest (‘Oh do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father, that I have three fine children, that I ...”

“... rivalries and feuds stimulated it; tooth-and-nail competition, it may appear, has been the price of progress. Comparison with Asia suggests that on balance Europe benefited from its self-imposed ordeals; elsewhere, both society and business enterprise were too inert to generate such struggles. There can always be too much of a good thing, no ...”

“... outcome being misery and humiliation for parents worrying about the young woman’s future bride price. Terence Ranger devotes a valuable section of his book to the rural ‘squatter’ phenomenon of 1980-83: a tidal surge of people spilling out of the dustbowl reserves to reclaim white farms (not always unoccupied) and ‘ancestral’ lands. As Ranger ...”

“... right to insist that Parkinson’s personal difficulty – for which he had already paid a heavy price – was no reason for him not to continue to make a valuable contribution to the performance of the Government and that the press was absolutely wrong. But the press has won, more’s the pity.’ And he closed his sermon on the career of Cecil ...”

“... and Knowledge Transactions in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, is good enough to be worth the price of the whole collection. Reading Shakespeare Historically might have been better served by an approach which emphasised its work-in-progress, occasional quality rather than trying to smooth it over. It would have been nice, perhaps, to have been provided ...”

“... and led to the arrest of Mark Thatcher in South Africa and the jailing of the British mercenary Simon Mann in Zimbabwe. Shaxson toys with the idea that the US (and possibly Spain and Britain) encouraged the attempted coup. The US would have had good reason to welcome a change of regime. Obiang’s son, Teodoro Nguema, owns an airline, a large timber ...”

“... for between 15 and 22 per cent of the cost of contracts. Scahill’s conservative estimate of the price of private security during Iraqi reconstruction so far is $5.6 billion. The figure is frightening, and the apparent creeping privatisation of the US military is, on the face of it, disturbing. Yet does any of this mean that Blackwater has earned the ...”

“... prevented the bursting of the South Sea Company’s bubble when its overvalued shares collapsed in price nor stopped the expansion of the East India Company’s activities. The South Sea Bubble exploited a basic ambiguity in the nature of share prices: were they a judgment on current value or – like imperialism itself – a bet on the future? Like today’s ...”

“... definition of an international world order’. In the process the Congolese have paid a high price. When Henry Morton Stanley arrived in 1876 the huge landmass, mostly covered in forest and coinciding with the drainage basin of the river, had been ravaged by the slave trade and the hunt for ivory; tribal chieftains had lost out to Portuguese merchants ...”

“... art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two narratives are here in constant tension. One is an up to date, deeply informed, but ...”

“... say “A friend of mine just died” doesn’t mean anything any more,’ the historian Simon Watney said in 1994, but that network is qualitatively and quantitively specific to how gay men live. Deaths in those networks mean deaths of whole areas of memory and association. Death for most heterosexuals means family deaths most of the time, up to the ...”