“... embourgeoisify the proletariat’, while for Giaime it’s a straight run from the mid-1950s to May 1968 with Bardot striking out ahead. But there must have been an intervening stage in which doubts about the triumph of national reconstruction were appearing like cracks in a piece of commemorative porcelain, even as older anxieties about defeat and betrayal ...”

“... You unconsciously adapted Martin’s phrase.’ This isn’t a terrible theory, and Barker herself may believe it. In any case, Mallory, who has taken a shine to Sasha, hopes it will put the whole debacle into perspective, rendering him not, as he’d earlier feared, ‘the tragic fucking hero in a world – a landscape – composed entirely out of ...”

“... 150,000 people are enslaved in scamming compounds across Cambodia. In Myanmar the figure may be as high as 120,000; there are tens of thousands more in Laos and Thailand. They have been brought from the villages of Xinjiang, the slums of Manila and Nairobi, the secondary schools of the Czech Republic. Scamming is no less grotesque an example of ...”

“... of speaking. Sometimes the spirits don’t use human speech (they are not human, after all): they may speak in whistles, buzzing sounds, rhythms, growls and yelps. The same is true of spirit possession: in Haitian vodou, every lwa that enters the possessed speaks in a different voice and has a different character. The possessed person exhibits the personality ...”

“... a classic German Habilitationsschrift: weighty, well argued, thorough and deeply researched. It may not be an easy read – the fact that its author isn’t a native speaker of English shows at many points – but it is most certainly an indispensable ...”

“... believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the Single European Act. Such are the playful flourishes of a scholarly ascendancy. In these pages Blair Worden has even ...”

“... limits, on pain of heavy fines from the Commission if they break central bank directives. They may still tax at their discretion, but capital mobility in the single market can be expected to ensure more or less common fiscal denominators. European monetary union spells the end of the most important attributes of national economic ...”

“... the then US transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, warned the Senate Appropriations Committee in May 2002, ‘We’ve got every salesman – 20,000 of them, I think – approaching us about how they’ve got some machine that will take care of everything we do, including not only detecting explosives but athlete’s foot as well.’ Every cracker-barrel sage ...”

“... were already speaking out against spontaneous violence on their social networks and though it may have been a complicated algorithmic lie, they looked to be a majority. But by January, with seven ‘acts’ down and more to come, trying to focus on who was or wasn’t up for a fight seemed pointless as long as huge questions still hung in the air about ...”

“... by tenants of temple lands, and rations of barley due to temple workers. These credits and debits may have been calculated in silver shekels, but coins hardly circulated at the time. In other words, of the three functions ascribed to money by economics textbooks – a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value – it was the second that came ...”

“... out all the interesting stuff, politics and economics and feuds and splits. I suspect this view may be mistaken. ‘Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers,’ Nina Power writes towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Woman. She then hands over to Toni Morrison speaking to Time magazine in 1989. On single-parent ...”

“... if only as a panellist, the strident Northern one, on Radio 4’s intolerable Moral Maze. Some may remember Mick Hume, once the editor of Living Marxism, now editor-at-large for Spiked and a contributor to the Times on topics such as Delia Smith, stopping smoking, and the holiday cottage in Broadstairs he and his wife bought to let for £150,000 in ...”

“... on, its victims unheard amid the squabbling and its effects quietly naturalised as part of Theresa May’s new political settlement. Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, delivered to Parliament on 23 November, confirmed that this is the ambition: none of Osborne’s major planned cuts was reversed, an overall budget surplus remains the goal (simply ...”

“... was the same in Glasgow and Berlin’. As many as 80,000 people took part in that year’s May Day procession, at which speakers celebrated revolution in Russia and called for Maclean’s release (the Daily Record said that speakers included ‘a Jew, a Lett, a Russian and a Lithuanian’). New rules on conscription led to strikes in some English ...”

“... shall drop from mine eyes, receive it as a sacrifice of expiation for my sins; grant that I may expire the victim of penance, and in that dreadful moment, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.Note that excellent semi-colon. People ask how I learned to write. That’s where I learned it.The whole of a Catholic life is lived in the shadow of the happy death ...”