“... that of Great Britain, enjoys the mildest and most indulgent government’. This thèse royale may appear to distance Smith from the wider world of liberal reform in which Rothschild locates him, but it identifies him all the more firmly with the forces of progress in his native land. In his lifetime, however, as Rothschild notes, it was his connection ...”

“... imperative and despise any attempt to resist it – hence his nationalistic positions, whatever he may say when he’s abroad, and his admiration for generals. When Oz lets the story loose (lets the ‘bimbo’ have her way, lets the world fall apart) he gets lost and falls back on romantic self-deprecation, becoming the famous hermit-figure in the Negev who ...”

“... and to restore the applied, or ‘sister’ arts to harmony with painting and sculpture. Stunners may have been doomed to be artefacts: ‘Georgie wears a chintz dressing-gown,’ her husband wrote, ‘and looks like a part of the furniture, and as if you could order any number of her in the Tottenham Court Road.’ All the same they wore ‘rational’ dress ...”

“... than a legend. Its attention to the cultural baggage – to Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt – may well be called for by hindsight, but I suspect that what made Seabiscuit such a legend in his own time was his ability to cast the seriousness of history into the shadows – at least for the duration of a ...”

“... and supernumerary cockerels, they feed a family and its visitors from November until the end of May. Or will do, if permitted. Pigs embody, in particularly vivid fashion, the lost amenities of an unimproved world. If, as we are promised, the foot and mouth epidemic gains in virulence with the cold weather, then the game will be up for the hobby farmer as ...”

“... Congo a battlefield after Africa’s first continental war – a war which some UN sources think may have cost three million lives, almost all civilian – it is time to ask what might have happened if Lumumba had lived and if the West had not intervened against him in the way that it did. Much might have been better; nothing could have been worse. As he ...”

“... not specify the distinctive property of the particular grain, but merely states two accidents that may be either present or absent without affecting the subject. Oats would be none the less oats if no horse in England and no human being in Scotland were to eat them. Chapter 2, ‘The Construction of the Pigeon-Holes’, concerns the early days of the ...”

“... seems reserved, in the film, for her son. In 1962, what happened to Raymond Shaw and his men may have seemed fantastic, but perhaps no more so than the news that had emerged five years earlier that American POWs in Korea had made false confessions, and, shockingly, that some had decided against repatriation. As a 1957 New York Times story put it: ‘For ...”

“... life-in-its-time is of more interest than her work. These days biography sells, and we may be moving to a point where fiction is seen to be no more than a useful biographical resource. Blackwood’s Lady-Carolineness, her unhappy childhood, busy sex life, connections to major figures in art and literature, and gaudy drinking does make her a ...”

“... to prevent such a passage falling beneath foreign control. The relevance of all this to Mars may be tangential, in a century’s time maybe not. An age might have to elapse before there can be any returns on capital in the form of scarce minerals in minable quantities, the costs of whose transportation alone might nullify their value. For the foreseeable ...”

“... worry and tenderness are everywhere in them. The story of 1937 is very different. From January to May, Nabokov is in Paris and London trying to organise his financial fate; Véra is in Berlin with Dmitri. Nabokov is also having an affair with a young woman called Irina Guadanini, who lives in Paris with her mother, and is one of his great admirers. Her ...”

“... political reform. In ‘a bright day, of which we already behold the dawn,’ he announced, ‘we may look forward with confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done.’ The essential structure of society, however, would remain ...”

“... of a guillotine blade terminates any simple-minded reveries. The constant flow of objurgation may have functioned as a relief from the mental pressure of it all, but if so, the reprieve was temporary. In December 1966 he hit rock bottom. He was ‘extraordinarily depressed’, unable to get up in the morning, condemned by his ‘outsider’ status to ...”

“... aren’t proposing any alternatives to democracy, they simply want us to know that its luck may finally have run out. That’s what makes this crisis for democracy different from any that have gone before. We might be worried that the Chinese are stealing a march on us with their neat, streamlined, ruthless, election-free politics. While we’re ...”

“... to talk to Eliza, she suggests, because they’re ‘reluctant’ to talk to other people: they may want a ‘therapist’ to reflect their own feelings back to them unchallenged, but that isn’t the sort of therapist Turkle thinks they should have. The attraction of robot companions, it seems, is their total compliance, loyalty and predictability. The ...”